Scottish Art News Issue 13

Scottish Art News

10 YEARS

10 Years of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Looking Again at the Scottish Colourists Margaret Morris: Her Life and Collection The Glasgow Boys Henry Coombes The 50th Anniversary of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010

ISSUE 13 SPRING 2010 £3

Contents

Spring/Summer 2010 THE FLEMING COLLECTION 4

News from The Fleming Collection Tenth Anniversary at The Fleming Collection in 2010

by Selina Skipwith

6 Scottish Colourists from The Fleming Collection A long-awaited exhibition of works by the Scottish Colourists will begin The Fleming Collection’s 2010 exhibition programme

by Selina Skipwith

12 Looking Again at the Scottish Colourists The widespread popularity of the work of Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter and Peploe has obscured their radicalism, both painterly and politically

by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach

John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) Les Eus, c.1910, oil on canvas, Hunterian Art Gallery © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland

18 Dancing as an Art: Margaret Morris, her Life and Collection In 1913 Margaret Morris met the artist J.D. Fergusson and a lifelong collaborative partnership ensued, one in which dance and painting combined to rich and influential effect

by Jenny Kinnear

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Fine Paintings 10th June 2010 An Invitation to Consign

SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE R.S.A (SCOTTISH 1871-1935) IN THE STUDIO - MODEL READING (DETAIL) Signed, oil on canvas 46cm x 41cm (18in x 16in) SOLD FOR £62,000 Fine Paintings Sale 2nd December 2009

Highlands & Islands: Paintings & Poems at The Fleming Collection

24 Picture in Focus: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Spanish Elegy, 1997

by Rebecca Mundy

28 Friends of The Fleming Collection: Behind the Scenes – Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbright

by Evelyn Gladstone

Enquiries: Nick Curnow 0131 557 8844

30 The Aspect Prize 2009/10 at The Fleming Collection

Elena Ratcheva Ben Hanly

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18th February

Paintings

33 Broughton Place Edinburgh EH1 3RR

182 Bath Street Glasgow G2 4HG

11-12 Pall Mall London SW1Y 5LU

29th April

Contemporary Art

0131 557 8844

0141 333 1992

020 7930 9115

27th May

Paintings

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www.lyonandturnbull.com

Cover Image

020 7930 9115 Other forthcoming paintings auctions:

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Lava Forms Lanzarote 2, 1992, chalk on black paper Courtesy of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) Lady in a White Dress (detail) oil on panel, 30.4x35.5 cm © FWAF

The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish Art in private hands and was originally conceived as a corporate collection in 1968 for Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd in the City of London. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation which aims to promote Scottish Art to a wider audience. The collection consists of works by many of Scotland’s most prominent artists, from 1770 to the present day, including works by early nineteenth century artists, the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists, the Edinburgh School and many contemporary Scottish names. Regular exhibitions drawn from the Collection as well as loans from public and private collections of Scottish art can be viewed in the specially designed gallery.

The Fleming Collection | 13 Berkeley Street | London | W1J 8DU tel: +44 (0) 20 7409 5730 fax: +44 (0) 20 7409 5601 www.flemingcollection.co.uk | flemingcollection@ffandp.com Opening Hours: Tues – Sat 10am–5.30pm Admission Free

Scottish Art News 2

Scottish Art News

Editor’s Note

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2009 posed significant economic challenges, yet the appetite for art

To subscribe to Scottish Art News please complete the subscription form

Gossoprie: Scottish Art News round-up

proved undiminished, with museums reporting significantly increased

on p. 72 of this magazine. Alternatively, contact The Fleming Collection.

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audience figures – art, perhaps giving shape to things that seem

T: 0207 409 5730 E: admin@scottishartnews.co.uk, or complete

The Glasgow Boys 2010 will see two major exhibitions of the Glasgow Boys in Glasgow and in London

by Roger Billcliffe

incoherent in difficult times.

a subscription form online at www.flemingcollection.co.uk

Scottish Art News Issue 13 is published biannually by The Fleming

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of exhibitions and events for the year ahead) and the centenary of

To advertise in Scottish Art News please contact:

Henry Coombes – The Bedfords The Bedfords, Henry Coombes’ most ambitious film to date, tells the story of Sir Edwin Landseer, favourite portrait painter of Queen Victoria in conversation with Katie Baker

Duncan of Jordanstone College. Also in this issue, Henry Coombes

Evelyn Gladstone | T: 020 7409 5784 | E: evelyn.gladstone@ffandp.com

This issue has a celebratory focus: 10 years of The Fleming-

Wyfold Art Foundation, 50 years of the Scottish National Gallery of

Collection, London. Publication dates: January and June.

Modern Art (marking its celebration with an ambitious programme

talks to Katie Baker about his most recent work, an engaging short film responding to the Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer’s painted vision

Behind Scottish Art News at The Fleming Collection:

of the Highlands and in particular his mental breakdown in later life.

Editor: Briony Anderson

With this issue’s focus on the Scottish Colourists, Alexander Moffat and

Picture research: Evelyn Gladstone

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Alan Riach highlight the radical nature of their thinking and artistic

With contributions from:

Gallery Interns:

Artistic Development: The origins of Duncan of Jordanstone College

by Matthew Jarron

practices, reinstating them as artists whose contributions to developments

Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art

Lucy Lyell

in painting at the beginning of the twentieth century have been arguably

Lucia Lindsay, Assistant Keeper of Art

Rebecca Mundy

44 What you see is where you’re at An ambitious exhibition programme marks the 50th Anniversary of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

by Simon Groom

overshadowed by their work’s widespread popularity and increasing David Shrigley, I’m Dead, 2007 Taxidermy kitten with wooden sign and acrylic paint Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

market value. Concluding this issue, regular reviews and previews, books

We would like to know what you think about Scottish Art News

and listings take us through the first six months of 2010, opening up a

and anything you would like us to feature. Email your comments and

landscape of possibilities in the art world.

suggestions to editor@scottishartnews.co.uk

Briony Anderson

48 Abigail McLellan obituary by Selina Skipwith

Regulars

Revised design concept by Flit (London) and Briony Anderson Printed by Empress Litho Limited

Fine art by fine printers

52 Art Market Round-up by Will Bennett 54 Books 56 Review 2009

KATE GRANT IT’S ALL ABOUT LIGHT

Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta Charles Avery: The Islanders

Scottish Art News Issue 13 is kindly sponsored by:

Sunday 1 November – Saturday 5 December 2009 10am – 4pm, Monday – Saturday

Joseph Crawhall: The Hunt Christopher Orr: Strong to Heal

60 Preview 2010 The pick of art to see in 2010 RSA New Contemporaries 2010, Royal Scottish Academy The Roberts: Paintings and Works on Paper by Colquhoun & MacBryde, The Scottish Gallery Aspects of Scottish Art 1860–1910, Hunterian Art Gallery Victoria Crowe: Collected Journeys, Bohun Gallery

© Scottish Art News 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Tapestry Revealed, Dovecot Studios

reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written

63 Scottish Art News: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010 66 Listings 68 Events

Marjoribanks Gallery 51 High Street. Coldstream. Berwickshire TD12 4DL T: 01890 882 882 E: info@mgallery.co.uk W: www.mgallery.co.uk

permission of the publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by The Fleming Collection but is not the voice of the gallery or The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

www.empresslitho.com All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

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Kate Grant Water, Sky and Seascapes Oil on canvas

Scottish Art News 4

News from

THE FLEMING COLLECTION 2010 is an exciting year for us as it marks the 10th anniversary of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

FROM TOP Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall, Patron of The Public Catalogue Foundation, with Robin Fleming, Chairman of the Trustees of The FlemingWyfold Art Foundation at the Face of Scotland exhibition at The Fleming Collection.

Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall is shown paintings from the Face of Scotland exhibition by (from left) Mr Geoff Richards, Fleming Family and Partners, Mr John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland and Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection.

Sir Jackie Stewart OBE, Host of the 2009 Patrons Annual Dinner

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Since the Foundation was established as a registered charity in 2000 the aim has been to further understanding in Scottish art through a changing exhibition programme in The Fleming Collection gallery on 13 Berkeley Street. The gallery, which is open free of charge to the public, exhibits works from The Fleming Collection and other public and private collections of Scottish paintings. It is the only museum entirely devoted to Scottish art in the UK and now mainly buys contemporary works for the permanent collection although it continues to fill historical gaps.

The Foundation’s aim from the outset has been to raise the profile of Scottish art, which is poorly represented in museums and galleries outside Scotland.

Since opening the gallery doors in January 2002, The Fleming Collection has hosted numerous highly successful exhibitions from important Scottish institutions, including the Hunterian Art

Gallery, University of Glasgow (Intimate Friends: The Scottish Colourists, 2003), The National Gallery of Scotland (A Picturesque Pursuit, 2004), Fergusson Gallery, Perth (Living Paint, 2005), Dundee’s McManus Galleries and Museum (Consider the Lilies, 2007) and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (Divided Selves, 2006 and Face of Scotland, 2009) as well as borrowing from a host of other Scottish museums, galleries and private collections.

The Foundation’s activities are funded entirely by grants and donations from charitable foundations, companies and private individuals.

Sponsorship is sought for the majority of its exhibitions and there are many ways in which companies and individuals can support the activities of the Foundation at all levels; these include Friends of The Fleming Collection, Corporate Members of The Fleming Collection and Patrons of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, details of which can be found in this magazine.

The Foundation and the gallery has also acted as a base for fundraising for numerous other charities and institutions including

a recent evening in aid of The Public Catalogue Foundation with their Patron, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall.

As always our exhibition programme for the new year is action packed and begins with a four day exhibition of the Aspect Prize finalists; the winner will be awarded £10,000 and a work will be selected for our collection. This is followed by two exhibitions both drawn from The Foundation’s permanent collection. The much awaited Scottish Colourists from The Fleming Collection, which will be the first time that all our works have been shown together in London, followed by Highlands and Islands: Painting and Poems, a collaboration with Mary Miers, Architectural Writer and Arts and Books Editor of Country Life. The exhibition will mark the launch of Mary’s latest book, Highland and Islands of Scotland (Poetry of Place) (see ‘Books’ pp. 54–55)

It has been a great privilege to be involved with The Foundation from the outset and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Trustees and my colleagues, without whose

The Fleming Collection gallery, which

faith, enthusiasm and hard work we would not have been able to achieve all that we have in our first 10 years. I wish to thank all of the companies and individuals who have worked with and supported us over the years, we look forward to collaborating on future projects. I would also like to thank Flemings Mayfair Hotel who are sponsoring our 10th anniversary publication, Inspired: Works from The Fleming Collection.

I wish to express my gratitude to all the contributors and advertisers in this edition of Scottish Art News and in particular to Lyon and Turnbull, Scotland’s oldest established auction house, for their continued support and generous sponsorship which has made this magazine possible.

opened to the public in January 2002

Selina Skipwith Keeper of Art The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation is a registered charity (Charity Commission Registration No. 1080197)

Artist James Morrison RSA RSW will host the Annual Artist led Dinner for Philanthropic Friends on 26 April 2010 (For further details see p. 68)

Scottish Art News 6

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The collective achievement of the four artists identified as the ‘Colourists’ is widely recognised, however, each pursued an individual path and they rarely exhibited together. Selina Skipwith examines their work and the influence that developments in painting at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in France, had upon their work

Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935), Paris-Plage, c.1907 Oil on board, 21.5x16.6 cm © FWAF

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he artists now known as the Scottish Colourists, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter, Samuel John Peploe and Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, have in the past thirty years excited more interest than ever they did during their lifetimes. They have been recognised as key players in the introduction of modern art to Britain, and among the most forward-thinking British artists of the early twentieth century.

The Colourists did not develop as a group, but pursued independent careers; indeed, the descriptive name, ‘Scottish Colourists’, was not coined until 1948 by T. J. Honeyman, when only Fergusson was still alive.

Although the four exhibited together only three times during their lifetimes, the name has now been widely accepted as the title for a group of artists who, following in the footsteps of their predecessors, the Glasgow Boys, assimilated contemporary developments in continental art and brought a new approach to painting in Great Britain.

The older members of the group, Peploe and Fergusson, were from middle-class Edinburgh and studied in Paris in the 1890s. They returned there regularly throughout their early careers, exhibiting in Scotland and London first and then in Paris from 1907. The two friends settled for a time in the French capital where they were part of the community of international artists known as the School of Paris. First absorbing the lessons of an eclectic range of nineteenthcentury masters including Whistler, Manet, Blanche, Sisley, Cézanne and Van Gogh, they later

First absorbing the lessons of an eclectic range of nineteenthcentury masters including Whistler, Manet, Blanche, Sisley, Cézanne and Van Gogh, they later turned their attention to the work of the avant-garde artists around them, notably the Fauves and their leader, Matisse

turned their attention to the work of the avant-garde artists around them, notably the Fauves and their leader, Matisse. Between 1909 and 1912 Fergusson and Peploe were leading members of the Anglo-Saxon group of Fauvistes based in Paris and were on friendly terms with many of the avant-garde artists there, among whom were Friez and the young Picasso. On their return to Britain before the First World War, they were undeniably among the most advanced British artists of their time and ready to develop their mature individual styles.

The two younger Scottish Colourists, Hunter and Cadell, also spent their formative years abroad. Hunter grew up in California and at the turn of the century began his life as an artist in the bohemian San Francisco artistic community. Working as an illustrator he was first and foremost a draughtsman, learning the skills of his trade from fellow members of the Californian Society of Artists and those they admired, such as Carrière, Forain and Steinlen. Hunter’s first trip to Paris in 1904 introduced him to Parisian illustration through such publications as Rire and le Mercure de France, which had already captured the imaginations of Peploe and Fergusson. Hunter settled back in Scotland in 1907 and spent the next ten years acquainting himself with Old Masters in Scottish collections as well as contemporary developments in Paris, while surviving mainly on the sale of his illustrative work to American and British magazines. His interests varied widely, from seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish Old Masters through Chardin to Cézanne, Chabaud and Braque.

Cadell was first encouraged to become an artist by a friend of his parents, the celebrated Scottish watercolourist, Arthur Melville. Cadell, like Fergusson and Peploe, came from a middle-class Edinburgh background and, like the other Colourists, studied art abroad, first in Paris and then in Munich, where his family was living between 1906 and 1908. Cadell’s first solo exhibition in Edinburgh in 1908 showed his early work similar to that of Fergusson and Peploe in their formative years.

Both Hunter and Cadell developed their mature styles in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In that decade, the four artists all spent time with one another but never worked together as a group. Peploe and Cadell were both based in Edinburgh and met up regularly in the summers to paint on Iona. Hunter passed winters in Glasgow and summers in Fife and then Loch Lomond.

Fergusson, spending increasingly longer periods in Antibes and Paris, received visits from the other three and would join them on their stays in France, Cassis for Peploe and Cadell or St Paul de Vence for Hunter, who lived there from 1926/7 to 1929.

Visiting London and Paris regularly and spending time on the Côte d’Azur, where most of the avant-garde artists who had settled in Paris in the early twentieth century had moved, the Colourists were more aware than most British artists of the latest developments in art, a fact reflected in their work. They were also on friendly terms with many of the artists working in France at that time. Hunter was in touch with Matisse and Epstein, and Scottish Art News 8

Fergusson counted Dunoyer de Segonzac among his best friends.

The Colourists were also better known in France than most of their British counterparts and sent works to the French salons, Fergusson and Peploe exhibiting with the Salon d’Automne as early as 1907. The first important exhibition of their work as a group took place in London at the prestigious Leicester Galleries where Peploe, Cadell and Hunter exhibited together. There followed a show in Paris in 1924, at the Galerie Barbazangues where the French State bought Peploe’s Iona Landscape, then another in London at the Leicester Gallery in 1925.

By 1928 Fergusson, Peploe and Hunter were starting to make a name in America when unfortunately the market 9

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crashed in 1929. Regular exhibitions in Scotland with the main Glasgow and Edinburgh dealers had ensured however that Peploe, Cadell and Hunter had each developed a network of faithful patrons and sometimes friends who helped to soften the impact of the Wall Street crash.

Fergusson was following a slightly different path as he lived mostly in France. The highlight of their careers must have been the 1931 exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, whose catalogue was prefaced by the British Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald.

The French public received their paintings warmly, and the French State bought one work each by Hunter, Peploe and Fergusson.

It all came to an end in the 1930s with the death of three of the Colourists, Hunter,

The Colourists were also better known in France than most of their British counterparts and sent works to the French salons

Peploe and Cadell. Each was commemorated by a memorial exhibition, but all seemed to have dropped from public consciousness by the Second World War.

Fergusson remained active but spent most of his time in Paris, where in 1937 he became the president of Le Groupe d’Artistes Anglo-Américains.

He returned to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War and decided to settle in Glasgow in 1940. Together with his lifelong partner, Margaret Morris, he took an active part in Glasgow’s art life: He was a founder member of both the New Art Club created in 1940 and the New Scottish Group started in 1942, and in 1943 he published Modern Scottish Painting.

Throughout the 1950s, he was

at the centre of the Glasgow art world, supporting young artists and befriending members of art institutions, collectors and dealers alike. Fergusson’s death in 1961 began a decade in which exhibitions would almost annually celebrate his achievements while his forgotten friends Peploe, Hunter and Cadell enjoyed little popularity and not a single show.

The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation consists of works by many of Scotland’s most prominent artists but is particularly known for its fine examples of paintings by the Scottish Colourists. When the collection began life in 1968 Scottish art was very underrated in terms of British art. Collectors outside Scotland were relatively few and prices reflected this.

David Donald, the original

collector for the company, was able to buy quality paintings by the Scottish Colourists for sums which today seem very low. The majority of these works were purchased from The Fine Art Society and the Lefevre Gallery in London and Aitken Dott (The Scottish Gallery) in Edinburgh.

In the first year that Donald began the collection he purchased four oils by the Colourists including Peploe’s A Vase of Pink Roses and Hunter’s Peonies in a Chinese Vase. Further acquisitions quickly followed over the next few years.

By the early 1980s, however, Scottish painting was becoming better known beyond the boundaries of Scotland. Prices increased rapidly, particularly for works by the Colourists, who were taken up by a number of London

OPPOSITE FROM LEFT Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937) The White Villa, Cassis, 1924, oil on panel 44.5x36.8 cm Samuel John Peploe (1871– 1935) Vase of Pink Roses Oil on canvas, 56.4x49.5 cm­

ABOVE FROM LEFT Samuel John Peploe Luxembourg Gardens, c.1910

dealers. Before 1970 paintings could be bought for hundreds of pounds, and by the late 1970s, a good Peploe could be purchased for about £5000. In 1988 Peploe’s Girl in White sold at Christie’s in Glasgow for £506,000, then a world record for the artist which was not broken in auction until 2001 when Peploe’s 1905 still life, The Black Bottle, was sold at Christie’s in Edinburgh. It is significant that the collection has purchased only one Colourist oil during the last thirty years – Cadell’s The Feathered Hat acquired by my predecessor, Bill Smith, in 1992.

Oil on panel, 35.6x27.9 cm George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) Peonies in a

Selina Skipwith is Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection.

Chinese Vase, c.1928 Oil on board, 61x50.8 cm All images © FWAF

Scottish Art News 10

THESCOTTISHGALLERY CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1842

Forthcoming Exhibitions 6-30 January Denis Peploe Glasgow Print Studio 3-27 February Alexandra Knubley William McTaggart 3-31 March Ann Oram R. Colquhoun & R. MacBryde 3 April - 1 May Alison McGill Edinburgh School 5-30 May Archie Forrest A Drawing Show by Amanda Game 2-30 June Rebecca Collins Modern British Paintings & Prints 16 Dundas Street Edinburgh EH3 6HZ tel. 0131 558 1200 mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Image: Robert Colquhoun, Fiesta: Settignano, 1951, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cms

James Giles RSA (1801–1870) The Island of Handa, West Coast of Sutherland © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation On view at The Fleming Collection in Highlands and Islands: Paintings and Poems 13 April–5 June

Scottish Art at its Best F.C.B. Cadell RSA, RSW Lemon, Blue & White Oil on panel Signed 14 ¾ x 17 ¾ ins c.1918

THE FLEM ING C OLLECT ION WE WISH TO THANK THE FOLLOWING FOR SUPPORTING OUR EXHIBITION PROGRAMME

Founder MeMber Fleming Family & Partners Ltd

Further works by the Scottish Colourists can be viewed at our gallery by appointment.

Corporate MeMbers

aLso

Evercore Partners Limited Eton College Flemings Mayfair Hotel RFIB Group Limited Ridgeway Partners LLP

Patrons of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Friends of The Fleming Collection

Duncan R. MilleR Fine aRts 6 Bury Street ∙ St. James’s ∙ London SW1Y 6AB Tel/Fax: 020 7839 8806 art@duncanmiller.com www.duncanmiller.com

For information on ways to support the gallery contact Lucia Lindsay

THE FLEMING COLLECTION 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU 020 7409 5784 │ flemingcollection@ffandp.com │ www.flemingcollection.co.uk

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Scottish Art News 12

Francis Campbell Boileau

The widespread popularity of the work of Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter and Peploe cannot be denied, but this, along with the national and international interest surrounding sales of their work at auction, has obscured their radicalism, both painterly and politically. Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach reassess their radicalism, particularly within the Scottish tradition

‘T

he painter of the future is a colourist such as has never been seen before,’ said Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Paul Gauguin.

That sense of doing something utterly new, radically revising what the experience of colour is, through a light that is common property to anyone with eyes to see, was what the Scottish 13

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Colourists brought to the world of painting in the early twentieth century. These were the most revolutionary works in the art world of Britain at that time, and yet, one hundred years later, their stature in this regard has arguably been forgotten or denied.

The Scottish Colourists – F.C.B. Cadell, S.J. Peploe, George Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson – were all

friends with a common purpose, later identified as a group by art historians, though Fergusson (known familiarly as J.D.) outlived the others by about twenty years, coming from the nineteenth well into the second half of the twentieth century. On his return to Glasgow in 1939, he was in regular contact with the major Scottish poet of the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid,

John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) Les Eus, c.1910 Oil on canvas, 216x277 cm Hunterian Art Gallery © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland

Cadell (1883–1937) Ben More from Iona, c.1913, oil on board 37.2x44.9 cm Hunterian Art Gallery

collaborating in the design of the poet’s major work of 1955, In Memoriam James Joyce.

Today, their works are considered with some condescension perhaps, as luscious, lovely, sensual indulgences of colour and exotic location. It’s true that they did not engage with shocking subject matter in the way of Otto Dix or George Grosz but there is more than one way to be revolutionary.

If we need artists of the calibre of Dix and Grosz to characterise and caricature the gross injustices of a society turning wealth into excess, poverty into misery, we also need a reinvigoration of our sensual appetite to appreciate what common property can convey. The Colourists enhanced immediate appreciation of a bowl of fruit, fine furniture and clothes, landscapes, seascapes. More than that.

Arguably, Peploe’s unforgettable paintings of Iona are profoundly suggestive because they constitute a statement about Scotland: this is the birthplace of Celtic Christianity, where Columba, arriving from Ireland, began to establish a national identity based on ideas of connection and kinship across differences. Here, the Book of Kells was created, and from here the nation called Scotland began to emerge over the next 500 years. In high summer, Iona has an almost supernatural luminosity and clarity of colour, and this is what Peploe gives us in his paintings.

These were the most revolutionary works in the art world of Britain at that time, and yet, one hundred years later, their stature in this regard has arguably been forgotten or denied

The Colourists help us to be honest about what we can see with the naked eye. As Kandinsky wrote in 1912, in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, one of the key manifestos of the modern movement, ‘The starting point is the study of colour and its effects on men.’

Yet it seems that if an artist is popular, he or she suddenly loses all claim to seriousness. Van Gogh himself – or Puccini in music – are prime examples. However, at the beginning of the careers of the Colourists, this was not the case.

Peploe was unable to secure an exhibition in Edinburgh. Fresh

from Paris in 1912, his work was stigmatized as incoherent, uncontrolled daubs of paint lacking the classical requirements, and no exhibition was mounted in his native Scotland for years.

Fergusson had to wait until the early 1920s before his work was exhibited in Scotland.

Why is their radical stature denied today?

Such literature as exists on their work establishes provenance and worth, but rarely emphasises the connection between the radical nature of their vision and that of their Scottish contemporaries, poets such as MacDiarmid or composers like Scottish Art News 14

dancing communally in a sacred rite in defiance of everything commonly associated with the clichés of dour, dreich, dismal, Calvinist Scotland. You couldn’t get much more radical. Are there any domestic houses in Scotland with a reproduction of this painting on the wall?

F.G. Scott or Erik Chisholm. The challenging nature of the ideas involved in all their work tends to become over-familiar when the packaging – the commodification – is commercially streamlined, as it is with the painters. With the poets and composers, the radical political thrust of their ideas and formal innovations retain something of their shocking immediacy. There is still something startling about Stravinsky’s Le Sacre – you can still hear the primal scream in it – and, 15

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over-familiar though it is, Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ are still staring straight out of the canvas at you, asking you, demanding, ‘Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re looking at?’

In this context, we might ask how we have measured the value of Fergusson’s great painting, ‘Les Eus’? This is a Scottish artist’s Sacre or ‘Demoiselles’: a stunning configuration of huge, bounding, healthy naked bodies, evidently heavy yet marvelously buoyant,

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937) The Feathered Hat Oil on millboard, 45.7x35.5 cm © FWAF

OPPOSITE George Leslie Hunter (1877– 1931) Lower Largo, Fife c.1924 Oil on millboard 20.3x51.4 cm © FWAF

Fergusson and Peploe spent their early days in Paris in its great period of radical ferment, Fergusson writing that for Peploe, nothing ever came close to those nights at the Ballet Russes. At that time, they were rubbing shoulders with Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Modigliani, Leger, not to mention Trotsky and Lenin, who were drinking round the corner at La Rotonde, within a few yards of Fergusson’s studio. In that studio, apparently, everything was painted white, so that the colour of the paintings could be judged and registered properly.

Similarly, it is often forgotten that in the early years, the Colourists’ paintings were framed in simple, white wood, without any heavy adornment. Ornate gold frames kill the colour on the canvas and diminish the whole point of what these paintings are doing. This demonstrates how a collector can tamper with or defuse the potent meaning of a picture. Perhaps this is a vital contrast with poems – a radical poem or a novel will retain its essential message even in a low-voltage, conservative, safe anthology. It can never become the acquisition of just one man.

If paintings are essentially visions, literature is essentially stories and songs.

The difference is that stories and songs can be carried in the mind and mortal memory, and are always subject to interpretation, individually and communally.

Paintings are to that extent more vulnerable to framing, being sold and purchased, exhibited as property, defused of their initial radical potential, that incendiary moment of their revelation.

However, even when we see the Colourists as the truly radical artists they were, in Scottish, British and indeed European terms, we need to go further and see them more profoundly in the Scottish tradition, connecting back through the radical ideas of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Patrick Geddes, and through the painterly uniqueness of William McTaggart. Compare McTaggart with the painters of the Hague School in Holland: fine artists but essentially lacking in the vision McTaggart provides through his original insight and sympathy with his Gaelic subject matter.

It’s this kind of vision which the Colourists take forward and hand on to William Gillies, William Johnstone, Joan Eardley, Alan Davie, John Bellany, Steven Campbell and Douglas Gordon.

Yet practically no art history tells the story of this Scottish tradition.

And so, no full evaluation of the impact and lasting value of these

artists holds sway.

This story should be embedded in the collective memory of all Scots – and all lovers of Scottish art. Compared to English art and literature of the period – the Bloomsbury group, for example – the Scots were astonishingly well ahead of the game, the true avant-garde.

And yet, in the Tate Gallery’s 20th century timeline emblazoned on the walls of the entrance hall, seen by all who use the escalators, going up or down, among all the names named, there are no Scottish artists noted as making any kind of contribution. In 1938, in the ground-breaking book that accompanied the first major exhibition to assert a distinct and identifiable Scottish tradition in art, The Arts of Scotland, John Tonge said this: ‘Scottish art as a whole – one must not forget the smooth facades and ordered simplicity of the New Town of Edinburgh – is much more involved and restless and dynamic than English art.’

There is still more to learn from the Scottish Colourists about that.

Such literature as exists on their work establishes provenance and worth, but rarely emphasises the connection between the radical nature of their vision and that of their Scottish contemporaries

Alexander Moffat is an artist best known for his portraits of the post-WWII generation of major Scottish poets now in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. He was Head of Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art until his retirement in 2005.

Alan Riach is a poet and the Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. His recent books include ‘Homecoming: New Poems, 2001–09’ and ‘Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography’. He is the President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

Moffat and Riach are the co-authors of Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (Luath Press, paperback edition 2009).

Scottish Colourists from The Fleming Collection 19 January – 1 April 2010 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7409 5730 www.flemingcollection.co.uk Tues – Sat 10am–5.30pm Admission Free Scottish Art News 16

SCOTTISH ART NEWS HALF PAGE 119 x 184.6mm on 137 x 210mm (trimmed page)

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Scottish Art News 18

I was born in London in 1891 of Welsh and Irish parents. My father was a painter and we went to live in France when I was only a few weeks old, so my first vivid memories are of France, and the beach at Boulogne, when I was about two and a half, with me running and jumping at the edge of the sea, my first free expression in movement! I remember even now the thrill of feeling myself a part of the sea, the sand and the wind. How wildly happy I was!

I wanted it to go on and on, and I screamed with rage when I was carried up the beach and taken home.

– My Life in Movement, Margaret Morris, MMM 2003, p. 3

M

Margaret Morris, her Life and Collection In 1913 Margaret Morris met the artist J.D. Fergusson and a lifelong collaborative partnership ensued, one in which dance and painting combined to rich and influential effect, by Jenny Kinnear 19

13

“At that first meeting he promised to teach me to paint – and he did. He said he would come and see me dance and interest his friends – and he did”

– and he did. He said he would

(1891–1980)

come and see me dance and

was a remarkable

interest his friends – and he did.’1

woman of

Fergusson convinced her that an

extraordinary energy and talent

understanding of painting and

who is now recognised as one

design was essential to dancers

of the great pioneers of modern

who wanted to produce creative

dance. She was also an inspired

and original work and from 1914

choreographer, artist, movement

painting became an essential part

therapist and prolific writer.

of the MMM curriculum, with

Her work, ‘Margaret Morris

classes often taught by Fergusson

Movement’, continues to provide

himself. Morris’s own artwork

a system of training for dancers in

flourished. She had a natural

many parts of the world.

ability for drawing and design

which had been encouraged

Morris began

performing when she was only

by her father, who was also an

three years old, reciting in

artist. During her childhood she

English and French at society

produced charming costume

smoking concerts. Throughout

designs, paintings in watercolour

her childhood, she danced in

and even designed and made a

pantomimes and acted with

toy theatre. Following her trip

several Shakespearean companies.

to Paris, her drawings became

Although Morris initially trained

energetic, fluid and full of

in classical ballet, she resented the

movement. She produced bold,

rigidity of the training. Greatly

colourful costume and set designs

inspired by Raymond Duncan

for her theatre productions such

(brother of the dancer Isadora),

as Angkorr Ballet (1917). She also

she set about inventing her own

painted portraits and still lifes in

dance technique, which she called

oil and, like Fergusson, sketched

Margaret Morris Movement

constantly. Sometimes she worked

(MMM).

in collaboration with Fergusson,

Dancing as an Art:

argaret Morris

At the age of nineteen

and very often their ideas and

Morris started her own School

interests sparked each other’s

of Dancing in St Martin’s Lane,

development and direction. Their

London and two years later

work shared common themes,

became London’s youngest actor-

including rhythm, colour, Eastern

manager when she opened a small

art and Celticism.

studio theatre in Chelsea. Many

of her pupils went on to have

Meg’, as they became known,

distinguished dance and theatre

started the Margaret Morris Club

careers, including Elsa Lanchester,

in London for the production of

Phyllis Calvert, Ruby Ginner and

original work and free discussion.

all three sisters Hermione, Angela

Among the members were artists

and Muriel Baddeley.

Augustus John, Jacob Epstein

and Edward Wadsworth. Charles

In 1913 she took a

In 1915 ‘Fergus and

dance troupe to perform in Paris.

Rennie Mackintosh and his

There, she met the Scottish artist

wife became great friends and

John Duncan Fergusson, and a

Mackintosh designed a theatre

fruitful and lifelong relationship

for Margaret Morris, which was

Margaret Morris, 1920s. Photo by Fred Daniel

ensued: ‘At that first meeting he

sadly never built. Writers such as

© International Association of Margaret Morris Movement

promised to teach me to paint

Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Scottish Art News 20

increasingly aware of the value of dance and movement as therapy. She had noticed a great improvement to the general health and posture of her pupils, and went on to teach her method in schools and clinics for disabled children both at home and abroad.

What made her approach unique was that she combined remedial exercises with the vision of an artist, incorporating form and design.

The outbreak of war in

1939 forced Morris to close all her schools, except in Glasgow.

Her life began a new chapter as she settled in Glasgow with Fergusson: ‘I was nearly fifty; but I was full of enthusiasm, and thrilled to be living at last in Scotland, which I had loved for so long…’. Together, they founded the New Art Club and the Celtic Ballet Club, again attracting many notable artists, dancers and

OPPOSITE FROM TOP Harem Dancers, oil on board, 1920

musicians. Morris also started

Flossie Jolley, oil on canvas, 1920

The Celtic Ballet, which became

ABOVE, FROM LEFT Devon Cottage, oil on board, 1918

a professional dance company in

Margaret Morris, Theatre poster, 1910

1947, performing successfully in

All images © International Association of Margaret Morris Movement

Britain, France and America. In 1960 she founded the Scottish

21

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Murry, Ezra Pound and

National Ballet, although this

sketchbooks, correspondence,

The Fergusson Gallery in Perth.

Further details of MM exhibitions:

Wyndham Lewis also attended,

wound up after only one major

photographs, programmes, diaries

Highlights from the collection will

Fergus & Meg

and Constant Lambert and

tour the following year. Sadly, this

and dance costumes from the life

first be revealed in two exhibitions

6 Feb – 3 Oct 2010

Eugène Goossens played for

was also the year of Fergusson’s

of this immensely colourful and

running from February 2010 to

Dancing as an Art, 100 Years of Margaret Morris Movement 1910-2010

performances.

death. For the remaining

captivating woman.

coincide with the centenary of

13 Feb 2010 – 12 Feb 2011

During the 1920s

nineteen years of her life she

Margaret Morris Movement.

The Fergusson Gallery

and 1930s Margaret Morris

set about revitalising MMM

the collection has remained with

Dancing as an Art will tell the

Marshall Place, Perth PH2 8NS

Movement continued to blossom.

as a recreational dance form,

the International Association

fascinating story of her life and

Tel: 01738 783425

Part of its ethos was that you

particularly in further education.

of Margaret Morris Movement.

career, and Fergus and Meg will

www.pkc.gov.uk/museums

would train, and then teach

It is a fitting tribute that, today,

Their lifelong President, Jim

take a closer look at the lifelong

Mon – Sat 10am–5pm

others. Pupils went on to run

MMM continues to develop and

Hastie, has done much to ensure

partnership between these two

Admission free

MMM schools that Margaret

expand across the world.

its survival since the 1960s, and

extraordinary personalities, whose

opened in London, Paris, Cannes,

most recently he has implemented

collections are now fittingly

Movement, Light & Shadow: Images of Margaret Morris & her dancers

Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester

remarkable life and varied

the gifting of the entire collection

reunited.

13 Feb -14 May 2010

and Aberdeen. Annual summer

career is well documented by

to Perth & Kinross Council.

University & Stirling, Pathfoot Building

schools held in the south of

the vast collection of material

This remarkable bequest will

Jenny Kinnear is Art Officer at The Fergusson Gallery, Perth

France also became an important

she left behind. Begun by her

join the impressive collection of

event in the MMM calendar.

mother, Victoria Bright Morris,

work by J.D. Fergusson which is

1 My Life in Movement, Margaret Morris,

For further details of MMM:

it contains paintings, drawings,

currently housed and displayed at

MMM 2003, p. 22.

www.margaretmorrismovement.com

Morris had also become

Margaret Morris’

Since her death in 1980,

www.artcol.stir.ac.uk

Scottish Art News 22

There are few landscapes in the western world more bewitching than the mountain glens of the Scottish Highlands and the scattered islands of the Hebrides. The beauty of this region, coupled with its romantic and tumultuous history and the innate musical and poetic nature of its people, has produced a remarkable oral and visual heritage. This exhibition is drawn from The Fleming Collection’s permanent collection and is a collaboration with Mary Miers, Architectural Writer and Arts and Books Editor of Country Life and author of The Western Seaboard. The exhibition will mark the launch of Miers’ most recent publication Highland and Islands of Scotland (Poetry of Place) and will see paintings and poetry brought together allowing the viewer to explore the rich history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Paintings such as A Stormy Highland Scene by Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) and The Island of Handa by James Giles (1801–1870) will hang alongside works by contemporary artists Will Maclean and Helen MacAlister.

Many of the contemporary works by the artists

and poets selected cut through the sentimental view of the Highlands to address a range of subjects that will resonate with anybody familiar with a region, which is today facing growing challenges and experiencing a decreasing population. According to the last major census in 2001, Scotland’s inhabited islands were home to 99,739 people. The Hebrides have the largest islands population, but census figures show how it has declined from 30,711 in 1981 to 26,502 in 2001. The next census will be carried out in 2011, the year which has also been nominated as ‘Islands Year of Culture’ by the Convention of Highlands and Islands and the Scottish Government.

PAT RO N S O F

13 April – 5 June 2010 The Fleming Collection

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FROM TOP James William Giles RSA (1801–1870) Island of Handa, West Coast of Sutherland, oil on canvas, 61×91.4 cm © FWAF John Guthrie Spence Smith (1880–1951) Ballachulish Quarries, oil on canvas, 87.6x100.3 cm © FWAF Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) A Stormy Highland Scene, oil on canvas, 91.4x121.9 cm © FWAF

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Scottish Art News 24

Image: SJ Peploe A Vase of Pink Roses (detail) 1925 © FWAF

T H E F L EM ING- W Y F OL D ART F OU N DATION

Highlands & Islands: Paintings & Poems

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Spanish Elegy, 1997 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) arrived in the burgeoning artist’s colony of St Ives, Cornwall in 1940, aged 28. Still a student and travelling on the recommendation of her principal at Edinburgh School of Art, Hubert Wellington, she was a young artist in need of the inspiration and recognition of a stimulating and exciting artistic community. Her move south would see her work flourish and her reputation become tied forever to the School of St Ives, where she painted until her death in 2004.

Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews, Fife, in 1912. She joined Edinburgh School of Art in 1931 after a drawn-out dispute with her father over her chosen career path.

In 1940, St Ives provided both a refuge from the Second World War, and an opportunity to develop her artistic practice among a thriving artistic milieu.

Barns-Graham’s development of a particular style of lyrical abstraction, her focus on interpreting the physical landscape and its natural energy through her original and distinctive view of the world, and her close relationships with other leading artists of the school such as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, have all done much to secure her place as of one of the foremost abstract painters of the St Ives School. Yet her Scottish roots, little discussed in relation to her work, played no small part in her development as a painter. On inheriting a house from her aunt in Balmungo, near St Andrews in 1960, Barns-Graham began to travel between her two homes, both physically and through the forms depicted in her work. At this time she was welcomed back to her native Scotland as a highly valued and esteemed member of the Scottish tradition. As one of the very few Scottish painters to favour abstraction at the time, her use of a vivid colour palette and her empathy with the natural order of things meant that it was easy to place her within the twentieth century Scottish tradition, particularly that of the celebratory Colourists. Her two work spaces, the modern, light and sea-facing studio in St Ives, and her studio at Balmungo, where her warren-like house was enclosed in an enclave of high trees, provided vastly different settings in which to paint. She divided her years equally between these two homes and studios, providing her with the similarly powerful yet contrasting views of the natural world which she would gather and project as the essential elements of her paintings.

Spanish Elegy, a late example of Barns-Graham’s painting was purchased by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation in 1999. Its abstract forms and colours, wholly liberated from the constraints of realistic observation, nevertheless hold true to the rhythms and nuances of the 25

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Scottish Art News 26

natural world that formed the core of all her painting practice. Spanish Elegy was painted in 1997, and hints towards the work of another abstract artist, the American Abstract-Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell. Motherwell’s Elegies to The Spanish Republic were painted in 1949–65, and were viewed and much admired by Barns-Graham during the 1960s.

In fact, Barns-Graham’s practice took influence from several key figures from twentieth century abstraction during her career, yet always remained close to her very singular vision. When she arrived in Cornwall the great Russian Constructivist, Naum Gabo, was also painting there, and his highly abstract work provided an early formative influence on her painting. Barns-Graham’s work avoided, however, the total abstraction of artists such as Gabo, instead always retaining its principal overarching reference to the natural world. Barns-Graham said in 1949 that ‘I am interested in using abstract forms mainly insofar as they are derived directly from natural sources’.1 Hence her paintings are forever tied to the ebb and flow, the interior energy and shifting dynamics of the natural world. Equally, unlike the more personal outpourings in the works of Abstract Expressionists such as Robert Motherwell, Barns-Graham’s paintings portray an objective position, picturing the world in its essence, rather than its literal forms, in a way that sought to reveal the elemental forces of nature rather than the internal mind of the artist.

This abstract, yet fundamentally natural style, developed early in her career.

Soon after her arrival in St Ives in 1940 she felt a conflict emerge in 27

13

her painting between the formal, figurative academic training she had received in Edinburgh and her natural impulse towards abstraction. Works such as Spanish Elegy make clear that it was Barns-Graham’s skill as a draughtsman which allowed her to retain the shifting nuances of the natural world within her work, no matter how much she attempted to shake off her formal training. Her meticulous drawing skills, as demonstrated in works such as Against the Wind of 1980, continued to form the solid basis from which her more abstract works grew, and provided her with what she called the ‘discipline of the mind’ essential to her painting.

Spanish Elegy’s lyrical brushwork and internal motion provide excellent examples of Barns-Graham’s abstract approach to the natural world. The bright forms she depicts emphasise the importance of colour in her work.

Liberated from its role of literal description, colour became for Barns-Graham her most vital expressive vehicle. In Spanish Elegy the contrasting tones of dark blue and black with bright white and yellow form dynamic contrasts which confuse the eye.

The process of drawing paint across the surface of the paper is also highlighted. Texture, stroke and colour all become key elements in the pared-down

form of the painting, echoing the movement of brush across surface and heightening our sense that these static, flat forms are in fact in motion.

It is difficult to discern what exactly is being depicted by Barns-Graham in this painting.

The concrete forms could make up the solid rocky outcroppings she observed while working in St Ives, or equally the monumental hillside forms of her native Scotland. Yet attempting to decipher the painting in this way may, in fact, obscure its original intention. The dynamic shifting forms of the painting can be more successfully ascribed to the forces and energies within the natural

world, rather than to physical objects themselves. Reality can only ever be depicted through what the human imagination makes of what it sees. In Spanish Elegy Barns-Graham presents her vision of the elemental forces of nature, and in doing so heightens our own perception and awareness of the visible world in which we live.

1 Barns-Graham quoted in Mel Gooding’s essay ‘Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Study in Three Movements’ in Wilhelmina BarnsGraham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, Tate Gallery Publications, 2005.

PICTURE IN FOCUS: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Spanish Elegy, 1997 Acrylic on paper The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Courtesy of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Rebecca Mundy is intern at The Fleming Collection, currently completing a Masters in Art History at UCL, London.

OPPOSITE Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Against the Wind, 1980, mixed media on card Courtesy of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

A Discipline of the Mind: The Drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is showing at The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, until 27 February.

For further details see Listings pp. 66–67.

Forthcoming 2010 Sales Bonhams are currently consigning Fine Paintings for our forthcoming sales. We are currently the only International Auction house with dedicated Scottish picture sales in Scotland.

Forthcoming sales 19th and 20th Century Pictures and Prints Thursday 22 April Scottish Sale Friday 20 August 19th and 20th Century Pictures and Prints Thursday 14 October Fine Paintings Friday 10 December Illustrated Joseph Farquharson, RA (British, 1846-1935) Fox and pheasant in snow (detail) Sold for £17,400 4th December 2009 Bonhams 22 Queen Street Edinburgh EH 2 1JX 0131 225 2266 0131 220 2547 fax www.bonhams.com/scottishpictures

Scottish Art News 28

Behind the Scenes: Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbright

by Evelyn Gladstone

Behind the Scenes: Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbright was the first rural trip for the Friends of The Fleming Collection. Initially the main focus of the tour was land art, in particular the works of Andy Goldsworthy and Charles Jencks, but after further study of the area it became apparent that there was much more to see.

Among the visits arranged were supper at Drumlanrig Castle, a tour of E.A Hornel’s house in Kirkcudbright and of Culzean Castle and Dumfries House (both designed by Robert Adam).

Having written articles in Scottish Art News on Andy Goldsworthy, Kirkcudbright and Dumfries House, it was only right to pay a visit to all three.

The first visit was to the studio of Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956), who moved from Lancashire to Dumfriesshire 29

13

in 1986. His local works are predominantly made from the local whinstone or sandstone.

He also uses brightly coloured leaves, icicles, wood, mud, snow and pinecones, with the aim of working with nature as a whole.

Much of his art is ephemeral and therefore photography plays a key role as a record, and as a way of capturing the effect of the context on the work itself.

Goldsworthy stores all his documentation as slides (he has over 50,000 slides), recording the date, location and weather conditions experienced at the time of documentation for each work. Working predominantly in the landscape, he uses his studio to experiment with the material from the landscape and to create installations.

Striding Arches is one of the most recent projects he has

ABOVE FROM LEFT Andy Goldsworthy, The Byre, Striding Arches, Marr Burn Photo credit: Evelyn Gladstone

undertaken in this area. Instigated

by Cairnhead Community Forest Trust which was formed in 1998, the Arches project was developed

by Goldsworthy over a period of seven years. It comprises three self-supporting sandstone arches, positioned on summits around a glen, and one situated, as if emerging from the window of a disused farm building known as The Byre, which was painstakingly restored around the arch by volunteers from throughout Europe. Each arch was assembled over a wooden scaffold and then locked together by a key-stone.

More recently, Goldsworthy has built a further arch in the Marr Burn, during one of the wettest Augusts on record, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch on the Drumlanrig estate.

Also locally, at Portrack House, is The Garden of Cosmic

Speculation (1989–2007), a series of earth formations, sculptures and garden motifs, designed by Charles Jencks with contributions from his late wife, Maggie Keswick, and their daughter Lily on their family estate. Jencks was born in America in 1939 and came to prominence as an architectural historian. He has since become a leading figure in British landscape architecture, basing his forms on chaos theory, genetics and fractals.

(His Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh takes a similar shape to the forms in his thirtyacre Cosmic Garden.) The Snake Mound, the first form created in the garden is a raised S-shaped earth formation surrounding a lake, which is complimented by the Snail, a taller spiral mound leading up to a point, from where the whole garden can be viewed.

One of the most challenging works in the garden is Cascade, a stepped concrete water cascade, in which the complexity of Jencks’ thinking behind the concept of cosmogenesis take shape.

A more traditional example of art in the landscape are the sculptures at Glenkiln (a private estate) interspersed with works by Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Auguste Rodin.

The sculptures were purchased in the 1950s by Tony Keswick, a great admirer of contemporary art, who came across Moore by accident. On arrival at Moore’s house, having been directed there to purchase taps, Keswick realised that Moore was no

ordinary salesman and struck up conversation with him. It was on this visit that he purchased his first sculpture (later confused with tractor parts upon its arrival at Glenkiln). Keswick’s friendship with Moore continued and he purchased three more sculptures from him. As well as these he also bought Rodin’s St John the Baptist and Epstein’s Visitation. The position of each work has been carefully and senstively considered to maximise the beauty of the surroundings. For example, the Visitation is nestled in a pine copse away from any road or house.

The four days spent in Dumfriesshire by the Friends of The Fleming Collections shows how land art is a prominent force in this area, with various cultural bodies currently in discussion about potential land form developments, promoting south west Scotland as an area of significant artistic and cultural interest. The Land Art Institute Project has been set up to put this area firmly on the world map as an inspirational centre of excellence for study and landform experimentation.

Evelyn Gladstone is Gallery Assistant at The Fleming Collection.

FROM TOP Hanry Moore King and Queen Cairn at Andy Goldsworthy’s studio Jacob Epstein The Visitation Photo credit: Evelyn Gladstone

Scottish Art News 30

BELOW, FROM LEFT Paul Kennedy, Springburn Hopes; Patricia Cain, Inscape 3 (detail);

THE ASPECT PRIZE The Aspect Prize is a showcase for contemporary painting in Scotland, open to all artists, established and emerging, Scottish, or living and working in Scotland.

The Prize was founded in 2003 in conjunction with

Paisley Art Institute to raise the profile of artists who have not had a commercial solo exhibition in London for the last six years. It is supported principally by Aspect Capital and is

Alec Galloway, Migration of Songs (detail); Scot Sinclair, Bombo (detail) All images © The artists

Glasgow based Patricia Cain’s current work focuses on her interest in the destruction and reconstruction of the urban landscape in Glasgow with particular interest in the river Clyde and its regeneration. Her work for the Aspect Prize exhibition has evolved from site visits to the New Riverside Museum site and other developments in the city of Glasgow. Cain completed a PhD at Glasgow School of Art in 2008.

one of the largest prizes for painting in the UK with a total prize fund of £30,000. All of the works submitted through

Widely known for his skill as a stained glass artist, Greenock-

an open submission were exhibited at the seventh annual

born Alec Galloway’s winning painting Migration of Songs, is

Aspect Prize exhibition at the Paisley Art Institute in summer

evidence of his ability to traverse both practices. He is head of

2009, and from this, four painters were selected to exhibit

Architectural Glass at Edinburgh College of Art (where he also

their submission, along with additional works, in the finalist’s

studied), and this interdisciplinary approach can be discerned in

exhibition in London in early 2010, which this year will be

the complex layering employed in his collage painting.

held at The Fleming Collection (12–15 January). All works in the exhibition will be for sale. The four finalists have received £5,000 with the eventual overall winner – to be announced at the London exhibition – receiving an additional £10,000. The Fleming Collection will select a work by the winning artist for their permanent collection.

This year Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art at The

Fleming Collection joined the 2009/10 Aspect Prize judging

Glasgow born and based artist Paul Kennedy brings together drawings and photographs to create paintings that explore the relationship between people and place. The context of his studio on the edge of the city centre in the east end of Glasgow feeds directly into his paintings, which capture a sense of memory and place lost through the city’s rapid development.

Kennedy graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2004.

panel which included Charles Jamieson, artist, chairman and prize co-founder; Michael Adam, prize co-founder,

The fourth finalist, Louisiana based Scot Sinclair was selected

entrepreneur and art collector and Andrea Kusel, Curator of

for his piece Bombo, taken from a series of works based on

Art at Paisley Museum and Art Gallery among others. After

imagery from North Korean and American military parades,

much deliberation the four artists selected by the panel for

which uses high gloss house paint applied over several layers.

this year’s final are Patricia Cain, Alec Galloway, and Paul

Born in Renfrewshire, Sinclair gained his undergraduate degree

Kennedy, who all live and work in Scotland, and US based

at Gray’s School of Art and his Masters in Fine Art in Illinois.

artist Scot Sinclair.

Find out more at www.theaspectprize.com

2010 marks the 50th anniversary of The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which is celebrating by rehanging its entire collection. The thematic displays will include singleartist spaces – the largest of which is a special commission by Martin Boyce. An exhibition tracing the long development of the institution, from its very beginnings in 1908 (with the founding of the Scottish Modern Arts Association), through to 1984, when it moved to its current site, will also take place. www.nationalgalleries.org (for further details see pp. 44–47) Dundee’s McManus Galleries and Museum, which has been closed for the largest renovation project in its 138 year history, is due to reopen in February 2010. An extensive community engagement programme will lead up to reopening its doors to the public on 28th February. There will also be a celebratory official opening during the summer. www.mcmanus.co.uk During March and April, the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010 will showcase a dynamic range of exhibitions, interventions, installations and screenings. 50 artists will participate across a wide range of venues, from established centres such as Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery and the Hunterian Art Gallery to lesser-known spaces, and temporary sites. The specific character of Glasgow forms the core of the festival and gives this internationally renowned event its very distinctive appeal. www.glasgowinternationalfestival.org (for further details see pp. 63–65) Artist Hamish Fulton’s ‘21 days into the Cairngorm Mountains walking project’ will commence in April in Huntly (where Deveron Arts is based). Fulton will walk in and around the Cairngorm Mountains for 21 days with only his rucksack and no accommodation facilities. A publication will accompany the project. www.cairngorms-leader.org

Jupiter Artland, a private collection of contemporary sculpture spread over 80 acres of garden and woodland near Edinburgh, created by art graduate Nicky Wilson and her husband Robert, is celebrating winning the prestigious Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards for 2009. It contains pieces by many leading sculptors including Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Jupiter Artland will reopen to the public on the 1st of May. www.jupiterartland.com The Royal Bank of Scotland have announced plans to lend some of its most important works to galleries and community arts projects. An early schedule of potential loans lists some of the best-known Scottish works in the collection, including a portrait by William Mosman of John Campbell, one of the bank’s great 18th-century figureheads, which is set to hang in the refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh when it reopens in 2011. The bank has already agreed to lend James Guthrie’s Portrait of Lady Finlay to the exhibition Pioneering Painters: the Glasgow Boys 1880–1900, mounted jointly in 2010 by Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow and the Royal Academy, London. RBS have denied that the decision to loan works was simply a response to public pressure after the government bailout last year, and that it was more a signal of RBS’s responsibility and transparency.

Edinburgh-based artist Craig Coulthard has been selected as the Scottish winner of a £460,000 (Lottery funded) commission for ‘Artists Taking the Lead’, one of the major projects for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. His proposal Forest Pitch was selected by an independent panel of artists and producers from the five projects shortlisted in August from a total of 98 Scottish entries.

Gossoprie n. Also: gossepry, -aprie. [e.m.E. gossypry (1550). Relationship as gossips. ‘Quhat tym...that thae...be gossepis and aye and quhil the sayd gossepry be compleyttyt’; 1520, Thanes of Cawdor p.134; ‘[To] fulfill the band of gossaprie’; 1533 Ibid. p.159. ‘I have...sent that express to your selfe...to crave two or three lynes under one of your hands..., or else to give up gossoprie’; 1651 Baillie III. p.138 ‘Until you had first given Martin Boyce, Electric Trees and Telephone Booth Conversations, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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up gossoprie’; 1691, Leven & Melv. p.647.’

Scottish Art News 32

The Glasgow Boys On the occasion of two major exhibitions of the Glasgow Boys in 2010, Roger Billcliffe examines their work and the way in which it was more akin to the painting of their contemporaries in France than in Scotland

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uring the 1880s Scottish art was transformed by a group of young artists who for ever will be associated with Glasgow. They rejected what they saw as trite and ineffective painting that had little integrity and no relevance to modern life. Sentimental genre scenes, historical pageants and romantic landscapes were the stock in trade of the majority of Scottish artists at that time, but these young artists – now known as the Glasgow Boys – brought integrity, seriousness of purpose and up-to-date methods of painting to Scottish art. Drawing their subject matter from the world around them, they spent their summers sketching the daily

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life of the people in towns and villages, returning to their studios in the city to prepare paintings for the annual exhibitions of the institutes and academies around Britain.

They took as their inspiration the work of contemporary French artists whose paintings were exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, either lent by a group of progressive collectors or submitted by the artists themselves. In particular they admired the work of Jean-Francois Millet, whose paintings had been exhibited in Glasgow since the 1870s and acquired by several prominent private collectors within the city.

The most immediate influence upon their work, however, was

George Henry (1858–1943) Japanese Lady with a Fan 1890–1899, oil on canvas © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

Jules Bastien-Lepage. This young French artist combined great dexterity with new ideas in a style of painting that came to be known as Naturalism. The Boys saw in his paintings a way forward. Following the example of Bastien-Lepage, they tended to populate their canvases with one or two principal figures, painted in a cool, clear light, using square brushstrokes that varied in strength and shape to create a perspective defined by variations in focus.

With honesty of technique and subject matter, these paintings posed a radical challenge to the status quo.

Their subject was contemporary life, which Bastien-Lepage and other French painters such as

the Impressionists considered to be both valid and important for a painter. Despite the power and integrity of many of these paintings, however, they were slow to find buyers. One of the Boys, John Lavery, had worked in France at Grez-sur-Loing, where he portrayed a different kind of local life. Alongside the rural peasants and village washerwomen this village was inhabited by poets, painters and writers, who had settled there in search of tranquillity and the stimulation of their peers. Returning to Glasgow, Lavery found the market for his paintings of French peasants very difficult. Acquired by influential families in Cathcart and Paisley, Lavery substituted their lives for the daily routine of his peasants.

At a stroke he had discovered a market that was to rescue him and several other Boys financially.

Despite frequently having their work rejected by London’s Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh at the beginning of the 1880s, by the end of that decade the Boys had become regular exhibitors, also showing at the Paris Salon and other European venues. In 1890 they were invited to participate in a well-publicised exhibition in London, the final exhibition at the prestigious and influential Grosvenor Gallery.

Here James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, George Henry and E. A. Hornel were praised for work of a kind not seen before in London.

As a consequence the exhibition

Sir James Guthrie (1859–1930) A Funeral Service in the Highlands, 1882 Oil on canvas © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

was taken almost in its entirety to the Glaspalast in Munich to show to a German audience the extent of the advances in art that the Boys had achieved.

This established the European reputation of the Glasgow Boys as the foremost painters in Britain at the time. The Pinakothek Museum in Munich bought paintings by D. Y. Cameron and Lavery. As their work was shown in other European cities, the Boys entered public collections in Ghent, Weimar, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Budapest, Venice and Paris. They were sought out by the secessionist movement that swept through Europe at that time, showing with Les XX in Brussels, the Munich, Berlin and Vienna Secessions, as well as in Scottish Art News 34

Arthur Melville (1855–1904) The Port of Passages, 1892 Watercolour © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

Arthur Melville, Orange Market, Puerta de Los Pasajes 1872, watercolour on paper, 58.4x76.2 cm © FWAF

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Despite frequently having their work rejected by London’s Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh at the beginning of the 1880s, by the end of that decade the Boys had become regular exhibitors, also showing at the Paris Salon and other European venues

St Petersburg in an exhibition organised by Diaghilev. Later in the 1890s, when they began to exhibit in the USA, their paintings were acquired by public collections there, including the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, which acquired Lavery’s A Passing Salute, a key painting from his period at Grez. However it was de-accessioned in the 1960s, when

such painting was out of fashion, and acquired in the late ’80s by The Fine Art Society in London, later selling at auction for over a million pounds.

These purchases overseas were matched by similar acquisitions at home.

Guthrie’s To Pastures New had been bought privately in 1887 and was presented to Aberdeen Art Gallery the following year.

Other key paintings by Guthrie in the 1880s were bought by members of the Gardiner family, who operated a major shipping business in Glasgow, several of which were passed on to Scottish public collections. The Gardiners also gave Guthrie his first formal commission for a portrait in Scotland, setting him on a path that was later to confirm him as the leading portrait painter of his day; from the late 1880s he

became the first artist of choice in Scotland for academic, business and personal portraits.

Lavery had further success with the Fultons and Clarks in Paisley and in 1888 was commissioned by Glasgow Corporation to record the visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition. After the Queen agreed to sit for him, Lavery gained an introduction to the most prestigious circles and soon he too took up a career as a portrait painter. One of Glasgow’s best-known collectors, Patrick S. Dunn (who, as chairman of the Governors of Glasgow School of Art, made Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s life a misery) was to buy Lavery’s The Tennis Party from the Pinakothek and later present it to Aberdeen Art Gallery.

In England, Hornel’s masterpiece Summer, was bought for Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 1892, despite a vitriolic campaign against it being waged in the columns of the local newspapers. Joseph Crawhall became one of the favourite painters of Sir William Burrell, who also helped finance Hornel and Henry’s trip to Japan in 1893–94. The Glasgow art dealer, Alexander Reid, another supporter of this venture, sold many paintings by the Glasgow Boys to major private collections around Britain.

By 1900 the Boys were seen abroad as the leading British painters of their generation.

They had achieved most of their aims – critical as well as worldly success, the right for artists to paint as they wished and not as fashion or taste demanded. They were at the peak of their powers, established as much in Edinburgh

and London (where several of them settled to live and work) as in Glasgow. Their legacy was to establish Glasgow as an artistic centre that in the words of Fra Newbery, headmaster of Glasgow School of art and apologist for the Boys, would ‘put Glasgow on the Clyde into the hands of the future historian of art, on much the same grounds as those on which Bruges, Venice and Amsterdam find themselves in the book of the life of the world’.

As with so many artists of their generation, however, public taste and fashion after the Great War was not kind to the Boys. Paris came to dominate the art of the early twentieth century.

What the Boys were painting was very much out of step with the new avant-garde. It was not until the 1960s, when younger art historians turned their attentions to the neglected movements of the previous century, that the Boys were rediscovered, along with that other long-neglected Scottish artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 1968 the Scottish Arts Council organised major exhibitions of the work of both the Boys and Mackintosh, although only the latter was seen outside Scotland. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s the Boys received much scholarly attention and, with the impetus of a growing market in their work, their achievements became more widely known and appreciated again. This year a major exhibition of their work will be held at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, followed by a showing in London (of a smaller group of work) at the Royal Academy. The Glasgow exhibition will bring together over 140 works from public and private collections in Scotland, England, Europe

and the USA, celebrating the achievements of a group of young men who put Scottish art on the world map and set an example to be followed by generations of Scottish artists in the twentieth century.

Roger Billcliffe is Director of the Roger Billcliffe Gallery and is author of books on the Scottish Colourists, the Glasgow Boys and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Sir John Lavery RA RSA (1856– 1941, The Blue Hungarians, 1888, oil on canvas © FWAF

Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900 is a major exhibition for 2010, featuring works by artists such as Guthrie, Lavery, Crawhall, Henry and Hornel.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow 9 April – 27 September 2010 Royal Academy of Arts, London 30 October 2010 – 23 January 2011 For further details visit: www.glasgow.museums.com www.royalacademy.org.uk

Scottish Art News 36

Henry Coombes

The Bedfords

Stills from: Henry Coombes

“I use the films almost like an ambitious canvas, the working process of the film becomes a backbone construction for making drawings, paintings and sculptures, props. The films become catalysts for a body of work”

The Bedfords, 2009 19 minutes, 38 seconds © Broken Spectre

Henry Coombes talks to Katie Baker about The Bedfords, his most ambitious film to date, which tells the story of Sir Edwin Landseer, favourite portrait painter of Queen Victoria

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or all its association with the shortbread tin and whisky bottle, Landseer’s vision of the Highlands remains as firmly planted in the popular imagination as his four bronze lions rooted to their granite plinths in Trafalgar Square. Celebrated in his own time, feted by royalty and aristocracy, he was instrumental in creating the Victorian image of Scotland.

Yet despite his success Landseer was afflicted by a fragile mental state and debilitating bouts of depression. Little wonder then, that this complex establishment figure and his uneasy legacy continue to hold a strong place in cultural consciousness. The latest artist to engage with this is Henry Coombes with his short film The Bedfords.

Coombes first came to attention with his impressive degree show at Glasgow School of Art in 2002, going on to jointly represent the country in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Besides film, his practice so far has encompassed painting, sculpture and installation, with recurrent reference to the traditions and tropes of upper class rural life. Playful

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and surreal in his approach, the work has an eccentricity to it that only serves to heighten the tension of a more subversive subtext.

Set in the Highland estate of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, The Bedfords opens with Landseer’s arrival from London to paint the family’s portrait. Sexual betrayal, morbid preoccupations and Landseer’s deteriorating grip on reality threaten to rupture the brittle veneer of this privileged and rarefied world. Seduced by the sexually dominant Duchess, Landseer succumbs to tortured hallucinations as the savagery of nature bleeds into the stiff formalities of the domestic interior. With a tightly written script and elegantly shot, Coombes creates a darkly oppressive atmosphere, culminating in a nightmarish image of Landseer’s studio. It is a haunting film, the brevity of which makes it no less rich in content, as once again, from a world of stately homes and hunting, Coombes leaves the viewer profoundly unsettled, madness and horror a hairsbreath away.

This isn’t the first time you’ve explored Landseer in your work, what keeps you returning to him?

Henry Coombes My relationship with Landseer started about six years ago with a series of watercolours. I don’t start off with an idea with painting, I look at the different relationships and scenarios that the paint offers. I often look at old masters and Victorian painting and found myself going to Landseer’s work. I find a lot of Landseer’s work quite chocolate-boxy, but elements of the paintings were like portholes into his psychosis which I had a connection with very intuitively.

KB Yes, even though his work has this ‘chocolate-boxy’ image, it was a potent vision he created…

HC When I say chocolate-boxy, it’s probably a bit dangerous saying that – I think it’s a bit unfair on him. Actually, elements of his paintings are unbelievably well painted. I think of that strange thing he did of animals that had just died in their last breath which he was Katie Baker

obviously quite attracted to, some of those paintings of dead birds and grouse that are just so economically and beautifully painted. And then within that painting you’ll have heavily handed figures, but there’s elements of the animals that are absolutely incredibly painted.

KB A lot of your work references that world of hunting, even back in your degree show those motifs were present, where does that interest come from?

HC It’s the way I work with the process which is really important.

The medium that I work with or the painterly approach that I have whether it’s film or sculpture or painting, it is very much about creating accidents. It’s a working document and so those things I’m interested in come out. The hunting thing comes from growing up in a family that went on holidays to Scotland, hunting and fishing, that is a really powerful imagery ingrained in me that kept on coming up in my work. I’m not looking for concepts or anything political in the work. I mean that comes out, I’m not denying that.

Scottish Art News 38

“The medium that I work with or the painterly approach that I have whether it’s film or sculpture or painting, it is very much about creating accidents”

Stills from Henry Coombes The Bedfords, 2009 19 minutes, 38 seconds © Broken Spectre

“If the work is viewed politically or socially then I’m not going to try to obstruct that or have a problem with it. I think it’s the same in music and film. An artwork can have a broader message even though it wasn’t intending to have that” KB

Hunting is so tied up with the aristocracy and the upper middle

class, and the politics behind that. There seems to be in your work an implicit critique of those structures, I had been wondering how much that was a conscious thing...

HC It’s not conscious, no, but sometimes when something’s not consciously criticised it’s dealt with more honestly and then I think it can have more weight to it. If the work is viewed politically or socially then I’m not going to try to obstruct that or have a problem with it. I think it’s the same in music and film. An artwork can have a broader message even though it wasn’t intending to have that.

KB The style of The Bedfords is different to your previous films like Laddy and the Lady which had a more Brechtian feel. The Bedfords is closer stylistically to a Hollywood costume drama – why the shift in aesthetics?

HC I think it was a kind of step up, with the story and the first time working with actors and dialogue and casting director. It was a story that I wrote and it involved dialogue and actors for the first time, 39

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working with a big cast and a big crew. I think all the films are a journey towards the feature film that I’m trying to make. Like the film Gralloch that I did at Venice that was very much a steppingstone towards The Bedfords and that film was very much based on an etching by Landseer and a response to his paintings. After that film it really informed me in terms of my direction and where I wanted to go. Having props that weren’t as restrictive, I wanted to actually move to where the actors had freedom to perform with the objects and the props. The Bedfords was the first time we shot on film, which was important as well I think.

KB You’ve worked in a lot of different styles and mediums in your practice already, can you see yourself continuing to move between these?

HC Very much. I’ve been developing a feature film on Landseer as my final piece of work on him. I use the films almost like an ambitious canvas, the working process of the film becomes a backbone construction for making drawings, paintings and sculptures, props.

The films become catalysts for a body of work.

KB How important is painting within that?

HC I’m quite romantic about painting, I think it can be a magical process that you’re never in control of and my personal, private view is that I think a lot of film directors have a painterly approach. Whether that’s Lynch’s embracing of accidents and things that happen as you make the film – it’s very close to the way that Francis Bacon talks about how he embraces accidents and traps ideas in the process. Whether that be Killer Bob in Twin Peaks or, you know, some moment in a Bacon painting. For me it’s a process and an approach to making, allowing the medium to help out, allowing it to deviate and embrace those things.

KB What about the soundtrack of The Bedfords? It feels like such a big part of the film, where did that come from?

HC I was writing the script, very early on in its development and a friend asked me to go to the 2007 Glasgow Jazz festival.

Cleveland Watkiss was playing and I was just absolutely blown away by it. The noises were just producing images in my head.

I really wanted to work with him, eventually got in contact and he agreed. We went to the studio and Cleveland watched the film being played on the laptop and composed the music using only his voice. Cleveland being an improvised jazz vocalist, no one knew what was going to be produced, so yes, that was a really magic moment to work with him.

KB I know you’re trying to get this made into a feature length film, is that your next major project?

HC Like I said, I’m still making objects and paintings in relation to the film, but yes I’m developing a feature film. The Bedfords is not a pilot, it’s a short film in its own right so I can imagine because of the nature of the length of the film it’s going to be different. Landseer is going to be a different character, in terms of he’s going to be much more assertive, he’s not going to be an object where all these things happen to him. He’s going to have a character that reacts to situations happening to him.

Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London.

Scottish Art News 40

Artistic Development: The Origins of Duncan of Jordanstone College

by Matthew Jarron

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n the recent Research Assessment Exercise conducted in all UK Higher Education Institutions, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (now part of the University of Dundee) was officially recognised as Scotland’s leading art school, and as one of the top five anywhere in the UK. This was an extraordinary achievement for an institution that for many years was very much a poor relation to its much grander counterparts in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The origins of this remarkable expansion go back exactly one hundred years to a bequest made by local businessman James Duncan of Jordanstone. But the story of his generous gift is far from straightforward, and involved almost half a century of power struggles, legal battles and funding problems before Duncan of Jordanstone College could finally fulfill its potential.

Dundee had had an art school since 1856, when John Kennedy began teaching evening classes at the High School. Over the next three decades numerous smaller art schools appeared throughout the city. Most of their students were tradesmen – joiners and mechanics who needed to learn the basic ‘graphic sciences’ such as Geometrical Drawing and Perspective.

In 1888 the Dundee Technical Institute opened on Small’s Wynd, with the aim of

providing far more advanced instruction for the city’s working classes. Art was taught there from the start by George Malcolm, but it was the arrival in 1892 of Thomas Delgaty Dunn as full-time art master that really marked the start of today’s art college. Dunn introduced day classes and massively increased the range of subjects on offer.

When a nationwide reorganisation of technical and art education took place in 1901, the Technical Institute was designated a Central Institution with a region-wide remit. All other art classes in the city were disbanded and some 300 students now tried to cram into the two small art studios in the Small’s Wynd building.

In 1906 a major fundraising campaign was launched which led to a new building opening on Bell Street in 1910 with the name Dundee Technical College and School of Art. The new school hoped to be able to offer the full four-year diploma course in art, but to do that it would need considerable extra resources. In 1909, while the building was still under construction, a generous bequest came from out of the blue which seemed to be the answer to everyone’s prayers, thanks to the late James Duncan of Jordanstone.

Born in 1825, Duncan had studied at Dundee High School before earning his fortune trading in South America. In his will, Duncan bequeathed some

Calum Colvin, Untitled (student work), c.1983 University of Dundee Museum Services, Duncan

New tutors such as Alberto Morrocco, David McClure and Scott Sutherland were among the best-known artists in Scotland, and were soon attracting students from throughout the country

of Jordanstone College Collection

£60,000 towards “founding in Dundee a School of Industrial Art, to be named and known in all time to come as the ‘Duncan of Jordanstone Art School.’” He listed in some detail the subjects to be taught there and concluded by noting that the school should be run in collaboration with the Technical College but should be entirely independent of it.

The problems were quickly apparent. Duncan had made his will in 1899, clearly

aware of the college in its original form but wanting his school to be a separate institution. By 1909, however, most of the subjects he expected it to teach were already being catered for by the college.

This, plus Duncan’s appeal for cooperation with the college was enough to allow its trustees to make a swift bid for the money. A plan was drawn up to use available land adjacent to the new building as the site for the Duncan of Jordanstone School.

David Mach, Carpet of Leaves, Camperdown Park, 1978 Courtesy of University of Dundee Museum Services, Duncan of Jordanstone College Collection

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Scottish Art News 42

FLEMINGS MAYFA I R F L EMI N G S A C H I C AN D DI S C R EE T TOWNHOUS E HOTEL I N T H E H EAR T O F MAYFAI R I S D EL IGHTED TO WELCOME F R I EN DS , COR P OR ATE MEM BE R S A N D PATR ON S O F T H E F L EMI N G COL L EC TION TO...

S AVO U R C U P C AK ES AN D C H AM PAG NE ENS CONC ED IN THE ECC EN T R I C G L AMO U R O F THE F R ONT R OOM TA K E A F T E R N O O N T E A A N D S I P W I C K ED MAR TINIS IN THE SUMPTUOUS DEC ADEN C E OF F L EMI N G S COC K TA IL BA R A N D TE A R OOMS R EL I S H R OBUS T COLOUR F UL EUR OP E A N F OOD S E R V E D WITH A T WIS T F R OM BR EAKFAS T TO DI N N ER I N THE OP UL E N T F L E MIN G S G R IL L EN J OY PAS S I O N AT E S ER VI C E WITH WAR M WELCOMES F O N D FAR E WEL L S ...

It soon became clear, however, that the Technical College and the Duncan trustees were unable to come to an agreement, and for the next twenty years the bequest would remain like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, tantalisingly close but always just out of reach.

By the time Delgaty Dunn retired in 1927, he had successfully fought off attempts to have the money spent elsewhere, but was no further forward in securing it for his school.

It was down to his successor Francis Cooper to recommence battle with the Duncan trustees, with the Technical College and with the Scottish Education Department.

Cooper had come from teaching art in a girls’ boarding school, and was much mocked by the students for his attempts to run the School of Art on similar lines. But his commitment to winning the elusive bequest was never in doubt, and his tenacity eventually won the day. In 1933 a complete reorganisation led to the creation of Dundee Institute of Art & Technology, with the renamed Dundee College of Art 43

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One notable benefit of the new building was the space to begin a collection of artwork by graduating students

given enough autonomy from the rest of the organisation to satisfy the Duncan trustees. In 1935 a site on Perth Road was acquired for a new purpose-built art college and architectural plans were approved in 1938 following a national competition. Just as everything was ready to go, the war intervened and the whole scheme was mothballed.

Cooper retired in 1953, just as the foundation stone of the new building was finally laid.

The building opened in 1955 and under the dynamic leadership of Cooper’s successor, Hugh Adam Crawford, the new college quickly built up a reputation far exceeding anything that had been possible before. New tutors such as Alberto Morrocco, David McClure and Scott Sutherland were among the best-known artists in Scotland, and were soon attracting students from throughout the country. In 1962 the college finally took the name of its benefactor of so many years before, and became Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.

One notable benefit of the new building was the space to begin a collection of artwork by graduating students. Alberto

Morrocco begun acquiring student pieces in 1955 and every year since then works have been chosen from the annual degree shows to add to the collection. Among the notable former students whose early work is preserved are Dennis Buchan, Grant Clifford, David Mach, Calum Colvin, Graeme Todd, Matthew Dalziel, Alan Michael and Christopher Orr. Works from the College Collection are regularly displayed around the University campus and can also be viewed by appointment.

AN D BEN EF I T F R OM EXC LUS I VE R ATE S WH E N S TAYIN G WITH US WE DI DN ’ T S AY WE WER E U N IQUE... OUR GUES TS DID

For further details: Tel: 01382 384310 or email museum@dundee.ac.uk Matthew Jarron is Curator of Museum Services at the University of Dundee, with responsibility for the Duncan of Jordanstone College Collection.

M O R E H O M E F R O M H O M E T H A N H O T E L | U N I Q U E S E R V I C E | A J E W E L I N T H E H E A R T O F M AY FA I R Christopher Orr Untitled (student work), 1999, University of Dundee. Courtesy the artist, IBID Projects, London, and Hauser & Wirth Museum Services Duncan of Jordanstone College Collection

W W W. F L E M I N G S . C O. U K WE DON’T SAY WE ARE UNIQUE... OUR GUESTS DO TELEPHONE +44 (0)20 7499 2964 7-12 HALF MOON STREET | LONDON W1J 7HB

Scottish Art News 44

What you see is where you’re at 2010 marks the 50th Anniversary of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and as its Director Simon Groom explains, there are many reasons to be celebrating

ABOVE Nathan Coley, There will be no Miracles Here, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art OPPOSITE Martin Creed, Work No. 975 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, on loan from the artist and Hauser & Wirth, 2009

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n 2010, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art celebrates its 50th anniversary. The occasion provides us with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate one of the great European collections of modern and contemporary art, and to demonstrate the gallery’s commitment to collecting and showing the very best national and international art in Scotland.

To celebrate this momentous anniversary, we are kicking off a year-long series of celebrations in November, with an exhibition entitled What you see is where you’re at, when the gallery will be rehung in its entirety for the first time in twenty-five years. But first, just how did we get here?

Since the early 1900s there had been considerable

public interest in building up a national collection of modern art in Scotland. The Scottish Modern Art Association was formed in 1907, with the aim of encouraging the creation of a separate gallery for modern art, and placing it under the control of the National Gallery of Scotland. However, the National Gallery had by statute been forbidden from acquiring work by living artists, or artists dead for less than ten years, although one or two exceptions were made, most notably for Kokoschka and the Scottish Colourists, Peploe and Hunter.

Between 1929 and 1948, Stanley Cursiter, the then Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, lobbied tirelessly for a modern ‘art centre’, and even went as far as commissioning an architect to

draw up plans for a site opposite the Portrait Gallery on Queen Street. However, it was only in 1958 with the offer of Inverleith House, a Georgian building in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, as a temporary venue, that the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art finally came into being. The gallery was officially opened on 10 August, 1960, by Kenneth Clark.

With the opening of the gallery, it was agreed that equal weight would be given to acquiring international and Scottish art. Through purchases, gifts and bequests, the gallery began to acquire a representative collection of modern art. The gallery’s first keeper, Douglas Hall, pursued a high risk, but ultimately extremely successful

strategy of acquiring works by artists not then in fashion, but who subsequently became so. His prescient purchases in the 1960s of German Expressionist paintings, for example, were remarkable. As the collection began to grow in importance and size, the gallery moved to the much larger John Watson’s building (a former school), to the west of the city centre, in July 1984. Richard Calvocoressi, the second keeper of the gallery from 1987, built upon Hall’s achievements to acquire for the collection not only one of the greatest collections of dada and surrealist art in the world, but also, with the Tate Gallery, one of the most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary international art now known as Artist Rooms. At the same time,

Between 1929 and 1948 Stanley Cursiter, the then Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, lobbied tirelessly for a modern ‘art centre’, and even went as far as commissioning an architect to draw up plans for a site opposite the Portrait Gallery on Queen Street the gallery was able to expand in 1999, when it moved into the Dean Orphanage, across the road from the gallery, to become the Dean Gallery, which also increased the size of the grounds to twenty-two acres. So within the space of fifty years, the collection has grown to more than 6000 works, and is now considered one of the best in Europe. Little wonder then that we chose to celebrate the anniversary of the gallery through its collection.

Scottish Art News 46

installation by the Glasgowbased artist Martin Boyce, who represented Scotland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. This specially commissioned work is a recent acquisition for the collection and is being shown for the very first time. Entitled Electric Trees and Telephone Booth Conversations, the installation makes full use of the height and dramatic scale of the largest room in the gallery.

Supported by Homecoming Scotland, the gallery was able to produce its first film about an art work and its installation,1 as well

Within the space of fifty years, the collection has grown to more than 6000 works, and is now considered one of the best in Europe

What you see is where you’re at launches the rehang of the gallery, and will present a new vision of the collection, radically transforming the look and feel of the gallery. Thematic displays will bring together iconic works, forgotten pieces and new acquisitions in innovative and often unexpected combinations and contexts. The first room, for example, traces how artists have approached the subject of the still life through time, and it has been fascinating to bring together works by artists such as Chardin,

Martin Boyce, Electric Trees and Telephone Booth Conversations, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Nicholson (William as well as Ben), Peploe, Morandi, and Caro.

Another room of exquisite beauty brings together large figurative works that include Picasso, Bacon, Balthus, and Freud, while a further room brings together different treatments of the head, including sculpture by Medardo Rosso, a wonderful bronze – a new acquisition by Turnbull, and Moore’s Helmet, as well as a painting by Auerbach, a print by Baselitz and a relief by Balkenhol.

Upstairs we have chosen to show a few works by the Scottish Colourists in an international context by comparing their use of colour with masters of the time working in Paris around 1910, such as Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard and Jawlensky. The next room then leaps forward fifty

years to look at the use of colour in the 1960s, bringing together for what must be the first time in the same room, major paintings by Lichtenstein, Hockney, Albers and Boshier, with a large polychrome sculpture by Paolozzi. A subsequent room looks at the use of white, and its association with ideas of modernity and utopia.

Other rooms will be devoted to works by single artists, such as Tony Cragg, the exquisitely subtle late works of Agnes Martin, Monument to V. Tatlin by Flavin, a recent film by the Glasgow-based young film-maker Luke Fowler, and a spectacular installation of works, 100 Blind Stars by Douglas Gordon. The centrepiece of the rehang consists of an extraordinary, large-scale

as reaching 60,000 children in Scotland through the innovative schools network, GLOW.

We have also been working with artists in different ways. Knowing the influence the gallery has had upon artists, we invited Callum Innes to curate a two-room display from the collection with selected loans, and he has come up with one of the most elegant hangs the gallery has ever displayed, reflecting a true artist’s eye for revealing correspondences between works in the most surprising ways. And we have been working with artists on new commissions, or showing new works. These include the American artist David Schutter, who will be marking his first showing in the UK with a room of new works, based upon an exhaustive three week study of Chardin’s still life in Edinburgh.

There is also a new work by the young German artist Kitty Kraus, who we showed earlier in the year and liked so much we invited her back. She has subsequently had a solo show at the Guggenheim, New York. Outside, a major work

by Nathan Coley, There Will Be No Miracles Here, has been installed in the grounds of the Dean Gallery

through the support of the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland, while the façade of the sometimes rather austere looking Gallery of Modern Art, is now host to Work No. 975 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, which ensures that everyone who visits the gallery at least enters with a smile on their face.

This is only the beginning. Throughout 2010, the displays will change on a regular basis so we can show as much of the collection as possible. As well as showcasing new displays from the collection, including major works from Artist Rooms, this dynamic programme will also consist of new commissions from many leading Scottish and international artists, as well as a major complementary programme at the Dean Gallery.

Simon Groom is Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. 1 More information can be found at http:// www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/ in_focus/4:9262/9261/9261

What you see is where you’re at From 28 November 2009 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 75 Belford Road Edinburgh EH4 3DR Tel: 0131 624 6200 www.nationalgalleries.org Admission free Roy Lichtenstein, In the Car, 1963, oil and magna on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Henri Matisse, La Leçon de peinture or La Séance de peinture [The Painting Lesson or The Painting Session], 1919, oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Samuel John Peploe, The Black Bottle, c.1905, oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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Scottish Art News 48

Obituary

Abigail McLellan Selina Skipwith

Born in 1969, Abigail McLellan studied painting at Glasgow School of Art, joining an exceptionally talented and vital generation of young artists, including Helen Flockhart, Peter Thompson and Alasdair Wallace. (Wallace became her life-long partner; they married last year). There Abigail developed an extraordinarily sure sense of both colour and design. Many joke that it is because Scotland has more than its fair share of grey days that Scottish painters have come to understand and to celebrate colour with such verve and Abigail certainly understood and celebrated colour in her paintings: pareddown, almost abstracted, images of single plants, flowers, and other distinct items, set against richly-worked backgrounds of saturated colour.

McLellan’s vision, for all its individuality, drew strongly upon the traditions of Scottish – and, particularly, Glaswegian – art.

Her striking simplifications of form and her bold sense of design owed much to the late nineteenth-century Japonisme of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, James MacNair and the Macdonald sisters, Frances and Margaret. A similar sense of compositional daring was also one of the traits that she admired in the work of Craigie Aitchison. She was touched, too, by Aitchison’s sense of humour, his directness and – above all – by the range and richness of his colour-palette.

In her own quest to create a comparable intensity of colour she evolved a highly personal technique, building up layer upon layer of translucent, quick-drying acrylic paint in short, stippled strokes.

The objects that she set on these luminous backgrounds – flowers, tree-branches, sea-fans – were often defined by their ‘negative space’.

She would, as she put it, paint ‘the in-between bits’. The Fleming Collection purchased Pink Sea Fan by McLellan in 1998 and subsequently purchased two further works.

Ten years ago, having just become an enthusiastic walker, she began to fall over and was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis.

McLellan refused to be cowed and continued to work and it was with both humour and extraordinary fortitude that she faced the illness that remorselessly destroyed her body and led to her death at the age of 40. Throughout a decade of worsening illness, McLellan continued not merely to practice but to develop as an artist. She will be much missed.

Courtesy of Rebecca Hossack Gallery

George Henry Girl Reading 1896 © FWAF

FLEMING FAMILY & PARTNERS For Onshore and Offshore Wealth Management Services

Fleming Family & Partners are proud to be Founder Members of The Fleming Collection and congratulate The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation on its 10th anniversary

Abigail McLellan, Pink Sea Fan, 1998, acrylic on canvas The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation © Artist’s Estate

Abigail McLellan, artist: born Middlesbrough 11 July 1969; married 2009 Alasdair Wallace; died 11 October 2009.

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For more information please contact: James Thompson 15 Suffolk Street London SW1Y 4HG Email: james.thompson@ffandp.com Telephone: +44 20 7036 5783 Scottish Art News 50

The May Fair Hotel, Stratton Street, London W1. Visit themayfairhotel.co.uk or cal

George Leslie Hunter Still Life with Tulips and Oranges SOLD FOR £433,250 ON 29 APRIL 2009 A WORLD RECORD PRICE FOR THE ARTIST

An Invitation to Consign to The Scottish Sale NEXT AUCTIONS IN LONDON 22 APRIL & 30 SEPTEMBER 2010

I

CONSIGNMENT ENQUIRIES +44 ( 0 ) 20 7293 5718

SOTHEBYS.COM

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Scottish Art News 52

2009 Art Market Round-up

by Will Bennett

LEFT

Colourist George Leslie Hunter, did not. Estimated

Anne Redpath, Summer Gaiety

at £120,000 to £180,000, its prospects were not

OPPOSITE

helped by the fact that it had also failed to sell

S.J Peploe, Still Life of Roses

at Sotheby’s Gleneagles sale just three years

with a Green Tablecloth

previously. This meant that the highest price of the sale was the record £45,600 paid by a dealer for Thomas Bromley Blacklock’s 1902 oil painting Fisher Girls. Two days previously Lyon & Turnbull held a sale of Scottish Modern and Contemporary Art and although 71 per cent of the 152 lots sold they were all low-priced works fetching under £5,000 except for The Homecoming (Macduff Harbour) by John Bellany which was auctioned for charity and made £10,000.

The problems of putting a sale of Scottish

art together, particularly in the current economic climate, were well illustrated by Sotheby’s auction in London on 30 September, where 56.7 per cent of the 157 lots sold. The Victorian pictures of cattle, sheep and dogs in Highland settings that once filled the Gleneagles sales went out of fashion long before the recession and Sotheby’s had wisely decided to put few of them in this auction. Not many of the 19th century pictures that were offered aroused much enthusiasm, most either failing to sell or scraping past their low estimates. Some more modern artists who were once popular with collectors have lost their appeal. There were 13 works in the auction by Sir William Russell Flint, whose nudes have long attracted male collectors of It is ironic that just as Scotland is increasingly asserting its own

specifically Scottish factors. The world’s economic woes have made

a certain age, but eight of them failed to sell and only one attracted

Fergusson or Cadell. These eight pictures alone totalled almost £1.6

political identity through the devolved government in Edinburgh,

buyers more cautious, potential sellers more likely to hold on to what

serious bidding. Jack Vettriano, beloved by Middle Britain but

million, nearly half the sale total of just under £3.4 million. The less

auctions devoted specifically to Scottish art have shrunk dramatically.

they have, and auction houses keen to cut costs. The latter certainly

detested by the art establishment, is no longer the hot property that

valuable Colourist works added another quarter of a million pounds

Were it not for the continuing popularity of the Scottish Colourists,

played a part in the decision by the two big auction houses to end

he once was. While many of the 15 Vettrianos (10 per cent of the lots)

pushing their quota past the half-way mark. Peploe still lifes achieved

whose best pictures command six figure sums, they would qualify for

sales in Scotland, although Sotheby’s points out that the market

in the sale lacked the slightly sinister sexual quality that his admirers

the three highest prices with Red and Pink Roses, Oranges and

endangered species status.

for Scottish art is increasingly international, attracting buyers from

look for, the fact that 10 of them failed to sell should ensure a

Fan selling within estimate for £421,250 to a telephone bidder. If

at least 15 different countries over the past couple of years. The

downward revision of estimates for his pictures in the future. The only

Sotheby’s decides to move the Colourists into another sales category

Christie’s both held auctions north of the border offering almost 450

location of auctions matters less than it used to and, although Scottish

one to fetch a significant price was The Very Thought of You which

then major specialist auctions of Scottish art will become a thing of

works for sale. Although they suffered from the growing international

sensibilities may have been offended by the move, there is no sign

went to a British private collector for £145,250.

the past.

economic crisis and performed less well than in the past they still ran

that Lyon & Turnbull and Bonhams, who now have Edinburgh largely

up a combined total of almost £7.3 million. Within months Christie’s

to themselves, have benefited from the pullout.

strongly, although even for them, the market is selective. Redpath’s

Will Bennett is the former Art Sales Correspondent of the

had abandoned separate Scottish sales altogether while Sotheby’s

beautiful still life Summer Gaiety, painted about 1947, went to an

Daily Telegraph who now works for the marketing and public relations

had moved its auctions to London where it offered much slimmer

by Bonhams on 21 August as part of its four day sale of Scottish

international buyer for £139,250. But it is the Colourists who are

consultants Cawdell Douglas.

catalogues.

art and antiques. While 84 per cent of them found buyers the

the unchallenged stars of the market for Scottish art. Of the ten

most important picture in the sale, Tulips and Fruit by the Scottish

most expensive paintings in the sale, eight were by Peploe, Hunter,

53

Not so long ago in the autumn of 2008 Sotheby’s and

Much of this is the result of the recession rather than 13

There were few quality pictures among the 108 lots offered

Joan Eardley and Anne Redpath continue to perform

Scottish Art News 54

Books Highlands cover 1a_Layout 1 24/11/2009 15:35 Page 1

John Lavery:

Paul Sandby:

Arbiter of Elegance:

Highlands and Islands of Scotland:

Diary of a Painter

Picturing Britain

A Biography of Robert Adam

Poetry of Place

Kenneth McConkey

Edited by John Bonehill

Roderick Graham

Mary Miers

Atelier Books

and Stephen Daniels

Birlinn

Eland Publishing, April 2010, £6.99

April 2010

Royal Academy of Arts, 2009

October 2009

£35

HB £35 PB £19.95

Hardback £25

There are few landscapes in the western world more bewitching than the mountain glens of the Scottish Highlands and the scattered islands of the Hebrides.

The beauty of this region, its tumultuous history and the musical and poetic nature of its people has produced a remarkable oral heritage. There are verses composed by gentle scholar saints, incantations and stirring panegyrics by the Gaelic bards, Jacobite songs and satires, laments inspired by love and exile, and great poems from the recent renaissance in the Gàidhealtachd, which address subjects that will resonate with anybody familiar with the region today.

This collection of poems of the Highlands and islands has been drawn together

Highlands and Islands

The selection has been made by Mary Miers, who lives in the Highlands and has a long association with the Outer Hebrides through her forbears and her family home in South Uist. She combines a deep knowledge of the places, people and psyche of the Highlands and Islands with the eye of a travelling scholar of architecture.

Highlands and Islands Only thethe little Only little white rose of of Scotland, white rose Scotland, That smells sharp and That smells sharp and sweet - sweet And breaks thethe heart And breaks heart

In this catalogue for the

In this new biography (the

by Mary Miers, author of The Western

achievements in old age, Sir John

touring exhibition Paul

first personal biography of the

Seaboard, and will include poems by

Lavery resorted to picaresque conventions – an orphan lad from Belfast,

Sandby (1731–1809), Picturing Britain, A Bicentenary Exhibition, which

architect), Roderick Graham

Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg and

he discovered a talent for painting while working as a photographer’s

will be at the Royal Academy in March 2010, leading scholars offer

traces the career of the classical

Hugh MacDiarmid, among many more.

assistant, got himself to Paris by a series of misadventures, became

fresh perspectives on his work, his role as a teacher and his innovative

architect Robert Adam (1728–92).

The book will be lauched at the exhibition of the same title at The

a leading member of the Glasgow School, and ended up as a royal

approach to printmaking. Encompassing rural, urban, modern and

Describing him as the ‘supreme arbiter of elegance’, Adam was the

Fleming Collection in 2010. The landscape, people and wildlife of

portraitist laden with international honours. His amusing, often

historical themes, his art is unrivalled among that of his contemporaries

pre-eminent architect of his day and his neo-classical style and use

the Highlands and islands have inspired some of the greatest poems

apocryphal tale published in 1940 obscures the fact that the most

for its remarkable range. Although celebrated in his day, the full scope

of colour has echoed through design ever since. Many of his ideas

selected for this publication by Mary Miers, who combines a deep

important diary of Lavery’s remarkable career lies in his painting. A

of his achievement has since been largely overlooked (regarded as a

came from his Grand Tour to Rome and the Dalmatia coast where

knowledge of the places, people and psyche of the Highlands and

friend of Whistler and Rodin, he was fêted at the Venice Biennale and

mere ‘jobbing’ artist). One of the achievements of this catalogue is that

he examined the very foundations of architecture, looking at and

islands with the eye of a travelling scholar of architecture.

became a Royal Academician and Official War Artist. During these

it goes a considerable way towards reassessing the key role he played

commentating on nearly every building he saw, particularly the ruins

years he was part of the international community at Tangier, where

in the portrayal of the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the

of classical Rome. His painstaking research enabled him to not only

he established a winter studio. At the time of the struggle for Irish

development of a new ‘touristic’ image of the landscape, which as the

design buildings of great enduring beauty but to understand more

independence he painted portraits of the rebel leaders, including an

catalogue explores, was at a time when Britain was becoming more

mundane matters such as central heating and plumbing.

John McLean

extraordinary portrait of the patriot, Michael Collins, on his deathbed.

conscious of its own self-image.

Ian Collins

A few years later an iconic image of his wife, Hazel, was used on the

from the architect’s personal correspondence and from contemporary

Lund Humphries

Irish currency. Winters in the 1920s were often spent in Florida or on

the catalogue addresses the political nature of these landscapes and

writings. His research reveals Adam’s passion and ambition to excel

November 2009 Hardback, £35.00

the Riviera, savouring a Scott Fitzgerald lifestyle. Five years before his

their multiple layers of meaning. He also documented Scottish events,

as an architect and his determination to be accepted as a gentleman

death in 1941 he set off for Hollywood to paint portraits of the stars.

including a 1751 sketch of the execution of John Young in Edinburgh,

within the aristocratic classes – contracts were awarded by invitation

This is the first book to be

This new account is the result of painstaking research that adds greatly

in which most of the female spectators appear with tartan shawls over

dependent on the architect’s reputation. This led him to become

published on the artist, and

to our knowledge of the painter, the Edwardian art world and many of

their heads, giving fuel to the debate over the origins of tartan (argued

the most successful architect of this class-conscious period, a period

celebrates his ongoing creativity in

his distinguished contemporaries.

as being a later, invented tradition).

in which Britain became the most prosperous country in Europe, and

painting, as well as his most recent

Many of his Scottish landscapes document change, and

Graham has meticulously researched Adam’s career, both

Poetry/Scotland

ISBN 978-190601129-1

£6.99

Eland Publishing, 61 Exmouth Market Clerkenwell, London EC1R 4QL www.travelbooks.co.uk

Mary Miers

Recounting his life and

Poetry of Place

which saw the foundation of the British Empire. The upper classes were

work in printmaking, sculpture and

of the twentieth century, Kenneth McConkey is the author of many

OUT IN MARCH 2010: Inspired: Works from The Fleming

building new homes and Adam’s neo-classical taste was highly sought

his designs for cathedral stained-glass windows. Raised in the north-

articles and books. He has selected, catalogued or contributed to

Collection

after. Adam’s designs such as Syon House for the Duke and Duchess

east of Scotland, John McLean (b. 1939) has been based in London

A specialist in British, Irish and French painting at the turn

of Northumberland, Dumfries House for Lord Dumfries, Fort George

since the early 1960s. Like many of the artists he admires – Braque,

Lavery, William Orpen, Alfred East and other artists associated with

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Fleming-Wyfold Art

for the Ministry of Defence and the Register Houses in Edinburgh

Miró, Gottlieb – he is self-taught. Throughout his career he has shown

Impressionism in Britain, most recently in shows such as ‘The Painters

Foundation, The Foundation is publishing Inspired: Works from

are mentioned in detail and accompanied by 24 pages of colour

resilience and invention in his work, his exploration of abstraction and

in Grez-sur-Loing’ (2000) and ‘The Glasgow Boys’ (2010). His books

The Fleming Collection. A companion guide to the collection

illustrations. ‘Robert Adam represents to us the enlightenment in stucco

colour, and often playful wit, only underlining a wider seriousness of

include Edwardian Portraits, (1987), British Impressionism (1989), A Free

Inspired comprises the favourite pieces picked by admirers of The

and stone.’

purpose.

Spirit, Irish Art, 1860–1960 (1990), Sir John Lavery, (1993), Memory and

Fleming Collection, one of the world’s finest collections of Scottish

Desire, (2002) and The New English, A History of the New English Art

art. Contributors have also explained what it is about the particular

introducing a lively combination of contributors – critics, curators,

Club, (2006). His lifelong interest in Lavery began as a boy being taken

painting they have chosen that inspires them. Internationally

musicians, architects, poets and painters – who provide a personal

to Belfast Art Gallery and Museum by his mother.

renowned author Alexander McCall Smith, film producer Andrew

response to the artist’s work. John McLean himself remains the central

MacDonald and former Scottish Minister for Culture Michael Russell

voice throughout, speaking eloquently both in words and pictures.

exhibitions on the work of Henry La Thangue, George Clausen, John

ALSO OUT IN APRIL 2010: The Glasgow Boys

are among the leading figures from the art world who have joined

Contributors: Jean Walsh, Hugh Stevenson, Roger Billcliffe, Kenneth

Michael Palin and Sir Jackie Stewart and many more in selecting their

McConkey and Mark O’Neill, Glasgow Museums Publishing

favourite work from the permanent collection. This publication has

Catalogue £14.95, Souvenir Guide £5

been kindly sponsored by Flemings Mayfair Hotel.

55

13

Author Ian Collins begins the book biographically, before

Scottish Art News 56

Review 2009

BELOW Charles Avery Untitled (Herd of Alephs) 2008 Pencil, ink and gouache on paper, 124.5x166 cm Photo Credit: Steve White. Courtesy the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

between Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay, where a complex combination

medium of watercolour to create a very elusive, yet alluring vision of

Bourgeois and Cy Twombly to more recent arrivals Bill Viola and Mark

of feminine horticulture and masculine culture combined to create

her absorbing subject. Although she does include Finlay’s sculptural

Manders, some artists explicitly reference classical mythology while

one of the great works of our age. Still, one might ask however, what

and textual poetics throughout Little Sparta, their presence plays a

others incorporate the concept of myth in more subtle ways. The

came first – the garden or its contents? The force of nature has been

less prominent role in these richly atmospheric and subtly translucent

exploration of myth and mythology is also found in other areas of

around infinitely longer than our tenuous civilisation, and it was only

dream-like images which recall Watteau, rather than any of his

contemporary culture, for example, design exhibited by the 2009 V&A

through the control of its mythic and physical powers that the creation

neo-classical successors. As with the magical paintings of the great

show Telling Tales, the music of singer Natasha Khan of Bat For Lashes,

of human history and culture was made possible. Thus in the great

rococo master, these delightful works of Janet Boulton with their

and the virtual world of Second Life.

scheme of things it is the garden – Aphrodite’s empire of the senses –

concentration on sensual involvement and emotional response seem

that creates the setting and possibility for Apollo’s world of the mind

to deflect and defer the immediate need for rational meaning and

Scottish artist Charles Avery. During 2008–09 Avery’s 10 year project

and Hephaistos’s platform for human art and technological endeavour.

explanation. This gives added significance to the Proustian aura

The Islanders has been shown at Parasol Unit, the Scottish National

suggested by the exhibition’s title. Mnemosyne, the ancient Greeks’

Gallery of Modern Art, Tate Triennial, Hayward Gallery and the Baltic.

age that gender is not merely a biological phenomenon but much

goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses, takes us back to

Avery’s project documents a fantastical island’s inhabitants, customs,

more importantly a socially constructed one. The genderisation of

before the reign of Apollo and the creation of reason and art, when

landscape and cosmology in text, paint and sculpture.

Psychology and feminism have revealed to our modern

A significant figure who can be added to this group is

most socio-cultural activities has also had strong influence on the

humankind was imagined to be in immediate contact and complete

Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta

visual arts as witnessed by the Arts and Crafts debate, for example.

union with nature. That previous natural existence persisted in the

ant farm’1, wherein Avery has produced an anthropological survey

Watercolours, Reliefs and Garden Works 1993–2009

Janet Boulton’s long and sustained engagement with Finlay’s

memory of the Greeks down the civilising generations, as it still

of island life. Visitors to an Avery exhibition learn that islanders are

30 July – 30 August 2009, Edinburgh College of Art

garden in all its varying character also raises issues of artistic gender

continues to haunt our collective unconscious.

addicted to boiled eggs pickled in gin and love to visit deities living

relationships. Little Sparta is a masterly twentieth-century reworking

on the Plane of the Gods. Avery’s mapping of the island is also an

of the eighteenth-century landscape garden where the Apollonian

evoke this eternal yearning which we have for our lost arcadia. Yet in

exploration of the process of making art. The artist adopts the role of

Selected by Bill Hare

The Little Sparta watercolours of Janet Boulton poetically

Chris Fite-Wassilak calls Avery’s island ‘a sort of metaphysical

power of masculine reason controls and triumphs over the barbarisms

her pictorial world of the imagination, we are closer to Aphrodite’s

explorer/archaeologist, gathering artefacts and documenting scenes

And the earth, anchoring in the perfect harbours of Aphrodite, meets

of unruly nature. As Pope declares in his gardening manifesto An

Isle of Cythera where ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ alludes not to the finality of

from his mind, and perhaps experience – Avery grew up on the Isle of

with these in equal proportions, with Hephaistos and Water and

Epistle to Burlington, ‘Still follow sense, of every art the soul’. Yet

death but rather to the regenerative power of love.

Gleaming Air… Poem On Nature, Pre-Socratic Fragment 98

sensibility also found its proper place in the lower hierarchies of Enlightenment aesthetics; with the practice of watercolour painting

Mull.

Bill Hare is Curator for the Edinburgh Cast Collection Project.

Rather than having a geographical or temporal location,

the Island society is located via beliefs which hold it together. Avery

As one of the curators of Edinburgh College of Art’s renowned

for instance, which, until the Romantics like Turner came along, was

has stated ‘There is no narrative progression to the project, although

classical art cast collection I was particularly keen to witness the

deemed the prerogative of women and amateur artists. So it is all

there is narrative in the form of myth...certain beliefs of the Islanders

impact that Janet Boulton’s three-pronged Spartan assault would

credit to Ian Hamilton Finlay to realise what an important additional

are explained by myths...What I am doing is to create a lot of distinct

have on one of the main citadels of the Northern Athenians. Many will

visual contribution Janet Boulton’s watercolour practice could make to

objects and events, and stories, which can be connected in a multitude

know that Edinburgh College of Art’s Sculpture Court, where Janet

the many other kinds of views and interpretations of Little Sparta that

of ways.’2

Boulton’s Remembering Little Sparta took place, was specifically

have been produced over the years.

designed to present the casts of the Parthenon sculptures in as an

Chamber, described by the artist as a time machine, which instead

authentic manner as possible. I was therefore very interested to see

technical skill and acute sensitivity, uses the so-called feminine

In Remembering Little Sparta Janet Boulton, with sure

One artwork that represents an island myth is The Eternity

of transporting a person, shows them the vastness of time. Installed

how this cultural clash between the two opposing Greek city-states

at the Hayward for the recent Walking in my Mind exhibition, the

would be played out. It was however, another dialectic which soon

Chamber is an eight feet high hexagonal prism on cast iron feet,

diverted my attention. At the centre of the Sculpture Court the artist

topped with a bronze dome, globe and seagull. Through a small

had placed the presiding presence of the Medici Venus, a plaster cast

opening one can view the interior consisting of multiple mirrors and

monument to Aphrodite herself. Thus unlike Ian Hamilton Finlay’s

coloured triangles, creating a kaleidoscope which appears to go on

Spartan domain, where Apollo, that fearful force of reason and terror,

FROM TOP

holds awesome sway, Janet Boulton’s Remembering Little Sparta

This Is Not An Attack,

chose to dedicate itself to a very different aspect of the power of the

Garden work

divine presence.

2007–09 © The Artist

With this seemingly minimal, yet profoundly challenging

infinitely. The Chamber was supposedly built by an island cult founded around a document entitled the Testimony of Minuso. The testimony Charles Avery, The Islanders, 2009

concerns a man who met a seagull which told him a poetic riddle containing revelations. The man did not die and was said to have seen

Selected by Rebecca Bell

eternity – the Chamber emulates this experience. The door is chained so only a glimpse of infinite time can be seen as to fully experience

intervention, Janet Boulton provokes dialectical debate worthy of

Aphrodite with

the Master of Stonypath himself. Now the issue of gender can be

Beehive. watercolour

Mythology has consistently provided western artists with inspiration.

time is feared to result in madness.

the focus for consideration. For instance, we are again reminded

81x76.5 cm

While it’s a territory commonly associated with historical art,

that the initial Little Sparta collaborative project was a joint one –

2007–09 © The Artist

contemporary artists are pushing new boundaries. From Louise

with Avery’s beautiful draftsmanship, showing slender islanders

57

13

The Chamber is accompanied by drawings executed

Scottish Art News 58

Charles Avery Untitled (Feeding the Gulls) 2007 Pencil and gouache on paper, 66x90 cm

Joseph Crawhall, Foxhounds and Puppies

Courtesy the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh

© Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

1 Chris Fite-Wassilak ‘Charles Avery’, Frieze Issue 119, Nov–Dec

Christopher Orr: Strong to Heal

2008

Ibid Projects, Hoxton Square, London, 24 May – 1 August 2009

2 Charles Avery Metropolism M http://www.metropolism.org/

www.ibidprojects.com

magazine/2007-no5/kosmologie-van-een-eiland/english 3 Nicolas Bourriaud http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/

Ibid’s temporary project space, a former east end uniform and textiles

altermodern/manifesto.shtm

factory (still with many of its original interiors and fittings) provided a

4 Ibid

compelling context for an exhibition of new works by Scottish-born

5 http://walkinginmymind.southbankcentre.co.uk/html/artists/

artist Christopher Orr.

view/charles

Marking a departure from previous work – minute canvases

(typically 9x7 inches), which situate figures gleaned from vintage illustrated sources within landscape (stage-) settings suffused with sublimity, and with which there is often no direct relationship, but rather a blurring of reality and fantasy – Orr’s latest works remain small-scale, but draw from new source material, namely twentieth century photographs and old master sketches. A manipulation of these references is seen in Time We Left This World Today, in which the head of the woman turns away from the viewer instead of looking straight ahead, as in the original painting. Other works look to such with long-legged dogs viewing the chamber. In seeing both the

Joseph Crawhall: The Hunt

keen huntsman and horse rider who depicted horses on numerous

drawings and then the chamber, the exhibition visitor becomes party

The Burrell Collection, Glasgow

occasions. Foxhounds and Puppies as well as Fox Terriers and

colour the original black and white photographs.

to the experience of the islanders, participating in their mythology.

10 October 2009 – 14 February 2010

Puppies are characteristic of the way in which Crawhall depicted

animals: even when his subject matter was a dog with its puppies, he

of the factory/exhibition space, two works commanded attention,

never painted sentimentalised pictures and there is no trace of the

not through their ambiguous narrative, or their immediate reference

anthropomorphism which was the Victorian painters’ stock-in-trade.

to an old master, but by an absence of identifiable features. These

Thus artwork meets artefact, and the gallery becomes a site for an anthropological field trip.

Selected by Marion Amblard

Avery’s Island can also be reviewed within the wider concept

source material as flower arranging manuals of the 1950s, reworking in After the last flight of narrow wooden stairs, on the top floor

of ‘Altermodern’, a compound word defined by Nicolas Bourriaud and

Every winter since 2005, the Burrell Collection has displayed a

Moreover, unlike the sporting paintings which became extremely

paintings, as with the exhibition as a whole are indicative of a more

the title of Tate Britain’s 2009 Triennial exhibition. The premise behind

selection of Joseph Crawhall’s works. This year, the exhibition includes

popular with Landseer, the hunting pictures on display at the Burrell

intense preoccupation with the quality of the medium itself and

Altermodern is the need for contemporary art to respond to globalised

nine watercolours and sketches drawn from the collection and is

do not represent sportsmen with the trophies of the hunt. Crawhall

paintings as one unbroken continuum. Abstraction assumes the role

perceptions in an ever-widening ‘chaotic and teeming universe’.

devoted to one of Crawhall’s favourite pictorial subjects: hunting.

painted two gouaches on linen entitled The Meet. In both pictures,

of the consciously obscured narratives at the same time that it is the

Bourriaud calls for discussion around his hypothesis of the end of

figures are an important element of the composition but horses and

viewer who steps into the landscape theatre rather than the figures

postmodernism, and the emergence of a global ‘altermodernity’.

(1861–1913) has traditionally been classified as a Scottish painter. He

dogs are the main subject of the paintings. Thus the current exhibition

who previously took centre stage.

Key composites of the ‘global’ in his discussion are travel, cultural

was a close friend of some of the painters of the Glasgow School and,

at the Burrell Collection celebrates the originality of Crawhall’s works

exchanges and the examination of history. The artist becomes ‘[a]

with Melville (1855–1904) and Walton (1860–1922), he is considered

and his love of horses, riding, dogs and hunting.

‘homo viator’, the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose

as one of the most accomplished watercolourists of the Glasgow

passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary

Boys. This group of artists who dominated Scottish painting at the end

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre-Mendès France University in

experience of mobility, travel and transpassing’.4 This definition can be

of the nineteenth century had a matter-of-fact approach to landscape

Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the

applied to Avery’s role in The Islanders.

and figure painting which owed much to the Barbizon and Hague

French Society for Scottish Studies.

schools, to Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84) and to James McNeill

3

The Islanders gathers the myths of a people, their origin,

Although he was born in Northumbria, Joseph Crawhall

Briony Anderson is editor of Scottish Art News.

history, deities, ancestors and heroes in an apparently systematic

Whistler (1834–1903).

Joseph Crawhall: The Hunt continues until 14 February 2010 at

fashion. It will be interesting to see where the resulting mythology

The Burrell Collection

leads and how its role develops in the wider context of contemporary

He was the only Glasgow Boy to specialise in the representation of

2060 Pollokshaws Road

Christopher Orr

art. In Avery’s own words, ‘I cannot tell you how the Island really is – I

animal life. According to Roger Billcliffe, it was probably Crawhall’s

Glasgow G43 1AT

Silver Branch, 2009

have no idea – I can state only the facts as I perceive them. You must

introverted personality and his fondness for animals which naturally

Tel: 0141 287 2550

oil on linen

be satisfied with this or you must travel there yourself sometime...’5

led him to be committed to the representation of animals.

www.glasgowmuseums.com

18.5x16 cm

Crawhall’s paintings are individual both in style and content.

The Burrell Collection owns over 140 works by Crawhall

Courtesy the Artist

Rebecca Bell works for Art on the Underground and is a regular

and the pictures on display represent some of the animals which

and IBID PROJECTS,

contributor to Slashstroke Magazine.

fascinated the painter: dogs and above all horses. Crawhall was a

London

59

13

Scottish Art News 60

Charles Hodge Mackie (1862–1920)

Preview 2010

The Red Bridge at Bassano (Ponte degli Alpini, Bassano Robert Colquhoun (1914 – 62)

del Grappa), c.1910, Colour woodcut

Head Study, oil on wood © FWAF

© Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

example of their current practice and for visitors of

The Roberts: Paintings and Works on Paper by

Aspects of Scottish Art 1860–1910, 30 April – 2 October

the exhibition to gain a greater understanding of

Colquhoun & MacBryde, 3 – 31 March

Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, 82 Hillhead Street

their work. (Rebecca Mundy)

The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ

Glasgow G12 8QQ

Tel: 0131 5581200

Tel: 0141 330 5431

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk

Born and brought up in Ayrshire to poor, working-class families,

This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary diversity of Scottish

Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde met at the Glasgow

art between 1860 and 1910 and coincides with the first significant

School of Art in the 1930s. They moved to London in 1941 and

retrospective exhibition on the Glasgow Boys in more than three

RSA in collaboration with representatives from the five principal colleges of art and six schools of architecture in Scotland.

The New Contemporaries exhibition

represents an attempt by the RSA to build lasting relationships with talented new contemporary artists and architects, a relationship they hope will develop beyond the initial exhibition platform.

The prestigious RSA galleries will give graduates an excellent opportunity to showcase their work to a wide audience and develop a relationship with the Academy. More than fifty selected artists and architects will be given the opportunity to display a selection of new works (rather than just submitting one piece), providing more scope to show a wider

RSA NEW CONTEMPORARIES 2010 3 – 21 April

Open: Monday – Saturday 10am–5pm

The Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL

Sunday 12–5pm

Tel: 0131 225 6671

Admission £2/£1 concession

www.royalscottishacademy.org The Royal Scottish Academy was formed as a collective guild of artists

ABOVE Martin Hill, The Prodigal Son,

quickly became associated with the Neo-Romantic group of painters

decades, Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 –1900 (Glasgow

who came together to support and promote other contemporaries

2009. Graduated from Duncan of

which included Keith Vaughan and John Minton. At a time when

Museums: 9 April–27 Sept and Royal Academy, London 30 Oct 2010–

within their field. From its conception a key aim of the Academy has

Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee

homosexuality was not only illegal but actively persecuted, they made

30 Jan 2011), to which the Hunterian is lending ten paintings.

little attempt to disguise their relationship and attracted a constant

start of their careers. For over thirty years the annual Students Open

BELOW Jamie Fitzpatrick, Ulysses’

stream of admirers, both male and female. The circle of friends that

collection, Aspects of Scottish Art offers a glimpse into the

Exhibition at the RSA provided just such an opportunity for students

Warrior, 2009. Graduated from Duncan

grew around them included the painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud,

burgeoning vitality of the Scottish art scene of the 1860s and 1870s

graduating from Scottish art and architecture institutions to exhibit in

of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee

Michael Ayrton, John Minton and the poets George Barker and

with examples of the free, luminous landscapes of Alexander Fraser,

one of the most prestigious exhibiting spaces in Scotland, at a time

Dylan Thomas, all attending the regular weekend soirees held by The

Sam Bough and William McTaggart, and works by George Paul

when opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit were scarce.

Roberts at their fashionable Kensington studio.

Chalmers and William York Macgregor illustrating their innovative

approach to genre painting.

been to actively support emerging Scottish artists and architects at the

2010 marks the second year of the RSA’s reformatted

The Scottish Gallery’s exhibition coincides with the

Selected almost exclusively from the Hunterian’s own

exhibition for graduating students. In 2009 the Academy came to the

publication of Roger Bristow’s illuminating double biography, the first

decision that the increasing number of students, and the changing

full-length study of their life and work to be published. The show will

creativity. While the Glasgow Boys were undeniably the most famous

nature of art practice in general, required a new form of exhibition,

contain oils, drawings, monotypes and original prints including some

Scottish import of these two decades, others in Scotland were

and hence the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition was born.

of their collaborative work for stage and costume design. Ken Russell’s

exploring new paths and playing a part in the creation of modern

Now, instead of accepting work by all Scottish art and architecture

short 1959 film on ‘the Golden Boys of Bond Street’ will be screened

art. This period is represented by works by the Glasgow Boys and

graduates, the Academy shows a selection of work by emerging

during the exhibition. (Selina Skipwith)

their contemporaries, from David Murray, Robert McGown Coventry

students chosen by Academicians and staff at the institutions.

The 1880s and 1890s were characterised by a whirl of

and David Young Cameron to the Glasgow Girls, the Group of Four Open: 10am–6pm Monday – Friday

and Charles Hodge Mackie. The exhibition concludes around a few

art and architecture, the 2010 RSA New Contemporaries exhibition

Saturday 10am–4pm

paintings by the Scottish Colourists, Charles Hodge Mackie and John

will provide the opportunity to view the very best of Scotland’s new

Admission Free

Quinton Pringle hinting at the diversity of Scottish art in the first

A curated presentation of 2009’s leading graduates in

creative talent all under one roof. This year new graduates have

decade of the twentieth century.

been selected by members of the Academy led by Joyce Cairns

Open: Monday – Saturday 9.30am–5pm. Admission Free

61

13

Scottish Art News 62

Victoria Crowe, Behind Redentore

Dovecot Studios: Weaving Patrick Caulfield’s

Mixed media © The artist

Pause on the Landing for the British Library

Scottish Art News

exploration and discovery, both literally and figuratively, are paralleled in the artistic process, which, in this exhibition, are manifested in

Glasgow I nternational Festi val of Visual Art

the preliminary works giving the viewer an unexpected insight into Crowe’s working process: each piece asks to be read as a work in its own right, as well as part of an accumulated sum of the painting’s many contiguous parts. (Briony Anderson)

An assortment of surreal objects inserted within the collection of one of Europe’s most important museums, a sound-work resonating from the banks of the river Clyde and a fleet of bicycles released onto the city’s streets are only a few examples of what to expect from Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010

Open: Daily 10am–1.15pm and 2.15pm–5pm Closed: Wednesday and Sunday Tapestry Revealed From 16 February

by Rebecca Mundy

Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street

Victoria Crowe: Collected Journeys – Paintings & Works on Paper

Edinburgh EH1 1LT

ABOVE David Shrigley, I’m Dead, 2007

Tel: 0131 550 3660

Taxidermy kitten with wooden sign and acrylic

The festival will take place during March and April, the fourth

www.dovecotstudios.com

paint, 94.5x50x50 cm

incarnation of the most dynamic and broad-ranging event in

Kitten and sign, 60x14x25 cm

Glasgow’s contemporary art calendar. For the 2010 festival

Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

over fifty artists will participate across a wide range of venues,

8 February – 6 March Bohun Gallery, 15 Reading Road

A series of four exhibitions which

Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 1AB

examines the compex process of

Tel: 01491 576228 www.bohungallery.co.uk

translating a painting into tapestry,

OPPOSITE

Gallery and the Hunterian Art Gallery – both taking part in the

from initial design stages to its

Kate Davis, The Long Loch: How Do We Go

festival for the first time – to much smaller and less well-known

India, Italy and Scotland are the focus of Victoria Crowe’s Collected

completion, will begin in February

On From Here? with Faith Wilding at the CCA

venues and even street corners and temporary sites. The 2010

Journeys, journeys which are not only geographical, but are also

with Tapestry Revealed Part One: an exploration of Pause on the

Glasgow. A project for the GI festival which

festival aims to further cement itself as a unique combination of

analogous to her artistic practice and the transitional process from

Landing, a tapestry designed by Patrick Caulfield, woven at Dovecot

includes the following works:

conventional ‘biennial’ in the major venues across Glasgow as

preliminary studies to large-scale paintings. Crowe often shows

Studios (2005) and especially commissioned for the British Library. The

FROM TOP

well as acting as a showcase for emerging talent.

preliminary studies, but presenting sketch books within an exhibition

exhibition aims to widen understanding of the artistic collaboration

The Self-sufficient minority study, 2009

has limitations. For this exhibition, Crowe will present mixed media

between designer and weaver, encouraging the viewer to engage

Photograph, Courtesy of the artist and Sorcha

future’, and the festival will place emphasis on the twentieth

works which echo the fundamental role that sketch books play in

with the tapestries in the same analytical way they would approach

Dallas, Glasgow

anniversary of Glasgow’s reign as European Capital of Culture

her practice, a space not only for gathering information, but for

any other artwork.

What have we got to do with a room of one’s

in 1990. As GI’s Director Katrina Brown explains, ‘Several of

experimentation, and these open pages are printed over and overlaid

own 2010

the key works, exhibitions and projects relate strongly to this

with experiential references, allowing for unpredicted results. Several

an incident from Laurence Stern’s story ‘Tristram Shandy’ and includes

Digital Film Stills. Courtesy of the artist and

theme, and we hope to do a number of things that will highlight

oils on paper – direct observations in Scotland (and investigations

references from the novel. Caulfield had completed the design for

Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow

the connection to 1990, such as creating a 1990 reading room,

of structure) – feed directly into the larger paintings, in which all the

this site-specific tapestry in 1995 at the request of the British Library’s

giving visitors the opportunity to see what the visual arts looked

various, interconnected elements: interior/exterior, personal/external,

architect Sir Colin St. John Wilson. It was the hundredth artwork to be

and felt like 20 years ago’.

past/present are delicately integrated (including Crowe’s trademark

installed in the library, and one of two tapestries created for the British

skeleton trees seen throughout A Shepherd’s Life). The repertoire

Library by Dovecot Studios – the first, designed by RB Kitaj, remains

changing cultural centre also forms the core of the festival and

of elements underscore the experience, rather than simply the

the largest tapestry woven in Britain and hangs in the main foyer.

gives this internationally renowned event its very distinctive

Caulfield’s design Pause on the Landing has incorporated

observation and Crowe’s responses are of equal detail as well as depth.

Ideas which have been in gestation since time spent in

India find expression in watercolours and a luxurious palette, while

from established centres such as Kelvingrove Museum and Art

The theme of the 2010 festival is ‘past, present,

The specific character of this vibrant and constantly

appeal. As Katrina Brown explains, ‘several projects for this Tapestry Revealed Part Two will take place between 4 – 29 May 2010

year’s festival have taken their cue directly from specific places

Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10.30am–5.30pm Admission Free

and buildings and of course, in working with the spectrum of visual arts organisations that work year-round in the city in

Venice also retains its prominence in large watercolours. Perhaps it’s the painting, which incorporates an image of a board used in her

Join NLS Director Dr Robert Perks and Cathy Courtney, Project Director, for

their diverse locations, the festival cannot help but be strongly

studio on which to pin source material that exemplifies the way in

an introduction to Artists’ Lives: the British Library’s oral history collections on

flavoured with the given architecture of our cultural landscape,

which her work is formed through drawing (collecting) from multiple

Wednesday 24 February 6–7.45pm, where there will be the opportunity to view

from Kelvingrove, through to Trongate 103 or the bridges

sources (journeys), concentrated and layered into paintings imbued

the tapestries woven by Dovecot Studios for the British Library.

over the river Clyde’. Brown goes on to state: ‘One of the

with complex personal, historical and cultural references. Journeys of

(For further details see p. 68)

distinguishing characteristics of the situation in Glasgow is the

63

13

Scottish Art News 64

“several projects for this year’s festival have taken their cue directly from specific places and buildings and of course, in working with the spectrum of visual arts organisations that work year-round in the city in their diverse locations, the festival cannot help but be strongly flavoured with the given architecture of our cultural landscape”

the city, recreates them with her own voice and then projects them back into public areas. In these ephemeral works, sound takes on spatial qualities, magnifying and questioning our perception of space while intermingling with the noises of the everyday which surround them. Philipsz is interested in the emotive powers of sound and its potential to transform and mould space and experience, and her unselfconscious voice projected through the unconventional settings she manipulates, Susan Phillipsz, The Lost Reflection, 2007

has the capacity to both transport the listener and heighten their

Sound insallation, 2 min, 10 sec

sense of place and experience. For Glasgow International 2010,

extent to which so much of it originated – and continues often

Installation view: Skulptur Projekte Münster

Philipsz will create a large outdoor sound installation beside the

to be found in – artist-generated or organised projects, from

2007. Images Courtesy the artist and Tanya

banks of the river Clyde, her first project on home ground.

long-standing initiatives like Transmission through to newer

Bonakdar Gallery, New York

organisations like Washington Garcia or Lowsalt’. And indeed,

Another Glasgow-based artist and graduate of

Glasgow School of Art, Kate Davis, will be collaborating with

it is Glasgow-based artists who are at the forefront of the 2010

influential American artist and feminist Faith Wilding on a

ABOVE Kate Davis

festival programme.

OPPOSITE FROM TOP

discursive project for the Centre for Contemporary Arts, which

Who is a Woman Now?, 2008

Gerard Byrne, From the series 1984 and

aims to explore and connect different contemporary visions of

Framed pencil and screenprint on paper

Festival the magnificent building of Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Beyond, 2005–2007. Black and white

feminism... The Long Loch: How Do We Go On From Here? will

170x130x2.5 cm

and Museum will play host to an installation by Glasgow-

photograph. Courtesy the artist and Lisson

see both artists examining a feminist past, present and future.

Arts Council Collection, Courtesy of the artist

based artist David Shrigley. Scattered within the display cases

Gallery

and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow

containing the highly varied artefacts of Kelvingrove, Shrigley’s

For the duration of the 2010 Glasgow International

“One of the distinguishing characteristics of the situation in Glasgow is the extent to which so much of it originated – and continues often to be found in – artist-generated or organised projects, from long-standing initiatives like Transmission through to newer organisations like Washington Garcia or Lowsalt”

Other Highlights

installation project will insert a series of realistic yet bizarre

Installation view of Douglas Gordon’s 24 hour

sculptural objects in more than a dozen of the museum’s own

psycho back and forth and to and fro, Solomon

A significant selection of important drawings by Joseph Beuys

glass cabinets. Working within the established formal framework

R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

will be on display from the ARTISTS ROOMS collection. Beuys

of the museum space, Shrigley has said that his work aims ‘to

Photograph by Kristopher McKay

had strong links to Scotland and his work will provide a context

subvert the context of the museum – you have to be a little

© The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

for much of the exhibitions produced by younger artists for

subversive and play with people’s expectations’. Indeed, to

New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

the festival. Renowned environmental arts organisation NVA

come across one of Shrigley’s works, which in the past have

will re-enact the infamous White Bike Plan, a Dutch anarchist

included a tent filled with a viscous cream-like substance, and

David Maljkovic

eco-action of the 1960s, by releasing fifty white bikes on to the

a stuffed cat holding a sign reading ‘I’m Dead’, within the

Nothing Disappears Without a Trace, 2008

streets of Glasgow. For Croatian artist David Maljkovic, Glasgow

rooms of Kelvingrove will undoubtedly prove a startling and

Photo collage on paper, 30x22 cm

International 2010 will provide the chance to stage his first solo

provoking experience for the museum’s regular visitors. Yet

Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and

show in the UK, while Gerard Byrne, who represented Ireland at

Kelvingrove is in fact the ideal location for such a project. Its

Georg Kargl Fine Art, Vienna

the Venice Biennale 2007, will produce a major new film work

varied exhibits, from artworks to animals, will provide a fittingly

for exhibition at the festival. Swiss artist Christoph Büchel will

eclectic backdrop. As Mark O’Neill, head of arts and museums

take on the imposing large space at Tramway with a dramatic

for Culture and Sport Glasgow states, Shrigley ‘will bring some

new immersive installation in its enormous interior, while

humour and wit to the way we look at the museum and the

punk artist-designer and radical feminist Linder exhibits her

objects in it – how we enjoy museums and the ways that they

montage images at Sorcha Dallas gallery and presents a unique

work’. At its best, we can hope that Shrigley’s project will work

performance in collaboration with fashion designer Richard

to transform this traditional museum space, for the duration

Nicoll and musician Stuart McCallum.

of the project, into something just as provocative and oddly arresting as the best elements of his practice.

For further details: www.glasgowinternational.org

For the 2010 festival Glasgow-born artist Susan

Philipsz will continue to use her own voice to transform and

Rebecca Mundy is intern at The Fleming Collection, currently

reform architectural settings. Philipsz reworks appropriated

completing a Masters in Art History at UCL, London.

sounds such as national anthems, love songs, and the noises of 65

13

Scottish Art News 66

Listings SCOTLAND ABERDEEN

LONDON

9 April – 1 May

Until 7 February

3 – 27 February

167 Renfrew Street G3 6RQ

78 George Street PH1 5LB

6 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Sir Peter Lely: Artist and

Ex Armarium: Mixed

Tel: 0141 353 4500

Tel: 0173 863 2488

Tel: 0131 557 4050

Collector

Object Show

gsa.co.uk

pkc.gov.uk/museums

bournefineart.com

Until 14 February

3 – 27 February

The Mound EH2 2EL

Ann Oram: New Paintings

Hunterian Museum and Art

The Fergusson Gallery

Collected Journeys –

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Tel: 0113 343 2778 gallery@leeds.ac.uk

Bohun Gallery Victoria Crowe:

AUCTIONS

Frances Walker: Place

Dean Gallery

Tel: 0131 624 6200

3 – 31 March

Gallery

Sculptures & Sketches:

Paintings and

Bonhams

Observed in Solitude

BP Portrait Award 2009

nationalgalleries.org

The Roberts: Paintings &

Dürer and Italy

J.D Fergusson

Works on Paper

Scottish Sale

6 February – 10 April

Until 21 February

Works on Paper

22 January – 22 March

30 January – 4 September

8 February – 6 March

Friday 20 August

Aberdeen Artists Society

73 Belford Road EH4 3DS

National Museum of Scotland

3 – 31 March

Aspects of Scottish Art

Dancing as an Art: 100

15 Reading Road

22 Queen Street

76th Annual Exhibition

Tel: 0131 624 6200

Meet your Maker

Kate Thomson & Hironori

1860 –1910

Years of Margaret Morris

Henley-on-Thames

Edinburgh EH2 1JX

1 May – 29 May

nationalgalleries.org

29 January – 14 March

Katagiri: Sculpture

30 April – 2 October

Movement 1910–2010

Oxfordshire RG9 1AB

Tel: 0131 225 2266

Chambers Street EH1 1JF

3 – 31 March

82 Hillhead Street,

13 February – 12 February 2011

Tel: 01491 576228

bonhams.com/

Tel: 0122 452 3700

Dovecot Studios

Tel: 0131 225 7534

Alison McGill: New Paintings

University of Glasgow

Marshall Place PH2 8NS

bohungallery.co.uk

scottishpictures

aagm.co.uk

Tapestry Revealed

nms.ac.uk

3 April – 1 May

G12 8QQ

Tel: 01738 783 425

Clive Bowen: Ceramics

Tel: 0141 330 5431

pkc.gov.uk/museums

The Fleming Collection

Lyon and Turnbull

hunterian.gla.ac.uk

Scottish Colourists

Pictures

19 January – 31 March

Friday 18 February

Highlands & Islands:

33 Broughton Place

Schoolhill AB10 1FQ

16 February – 13 March Peacock Visual Arts

Tapestry Revealed Part Two

Royal Scottish Academy

3 April – 1 May

Frances Walker:

4 – 29 May

RSA New Contemporaries

Edinburgh School: Works

A Path Along An Edge

10 Infirmary Street EH1 1LT

3 – 21 April

on Paper

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and

13 March – 24 April

Tel: 0131 550 3660

The Mound EH2 2EL

3 April – 1 May

Museum

Mount Stuart

Paintings & Poetry

Edinburgh EH1 3RR

Jacques Coetzer:

dovecotstudios.com

Tel: 0131 225 6671

Archie Forrest: New Paintings

Pioneering Painters: The

Lee Mingwei

13 April – 5 June

Tel: 0131 557 8844

royalscottishacademy.org

5 – 30 May

Glasgow Boys 1880–1900

16 May – 30 September

13 Berkeley Street W1J 8DU

lyonandturnbull.com

Weekend Cathedral

AROUND SCOTLAND

8 May –19 June

Edinburgh College of Art

A Drawing Show by

9 April – 27 September

Isle of Bute PA20 9LR

Tel: 020 7409 5730

21 Castle Street

Degree Show

Scottish National Gallery of

Amanda Game

Argyle Street G3 8AG

Tel: 0170 050 3877

flemingcollection.co.uk

AB11 5BQ

12 – 20 June

Modern Art

5 – 30 May

Tel: 0141 276 9599

mountstuart.com

Tel: 0122 463 9539

Lauriston Place EH3 9DF

What you see is where

16 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

glasgowmuseums.com

peacockvisualarts.com

Tel: 0131 221 6000

you’re at

Tel: 0131 558 1200

eca.ac.uk

Until 28 February

scottish-gallery.co.uk

DUNDEE

Sotheby’s The Scottish Sale

Royal Academy of Arts

22 April

Tolbooth Art Centre

Premiums

34/35 New Bond St

SWG3

Passion for Pastel

5 – 14 February

London W1A 2AA

Little Magazine

5 – 20 February

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain

Tel: 0207 293 5077

Edinburgh Printmakers

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Talbot Rice Gallery

12 February – 12 March

4 High Street

13 March – 13 June

sothebys.com

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Reveal

April – August

Drawing for Instruction

100 Eastvale Place

Kirkcudbright DG6 4JX

Burlington House

No Reflections

20 March – 8 May

75 Belford Road EH4 3DR

22 January – 6 March

G3 8QG

Tel: 01557 331 556

Piccadilly W1J 0BD

Until 14 February

Alfons Bytautas

Tel: 0131 624 6200

University of Edinburgh

Tel: 0141 357 7246

kirkcudbright.co.uk

Tel: 020 7300 8000

152 Nethergate DD1 4DY

22 May – 3 July

nationalgalleries.org

Old College

swg3.tv

Tel: 0138 290 9900

23 Union Street EH1 3LR

dca.org.uk

Tel: 0131 557 2479

The Scottish Gallery

Tel: 0131 650 2210

edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

Denis Peploe RSA

trg.ed.ac.uk

Artist Rooms:

EDINBURGH

South Bridge EH8 9YL

6 – 30 January GLASGOW

royalacademy.org.uk St Andrews Museum

PERTH

Alex Frost: Hotpot [art,

ART FAIRS Glasgow Art Fair 25 – 28 March

OTHER

people + food]: Fife

George Square Glasgow

Perth Museum & Gallery

Contemporary Art & Craft

The Stanley and Audrey

Tel: 0141 552 6027

Scottish Masters:

Food Exhibition

Burton Gallery

glasgowartfair.com

A Selection from the

23 January – 7 March

A Discipline of the

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Glasgow Print Studio:

Bourne Fine Art

Toby Paterson

Mixed Exhibition

John McLean Sculptures

30 January – 28 March

6 – 30 January

Glasgow School of Art

Golden Age of Scottish

Kinburn Park

Mind: The Drawings of

London Art Fair

12 February – 6 March

45 Market Street EH1 1DF

Alexandra Knubley: New

GSA New Estate Exhibition

Painting 1750–1850

Doubledykes Road

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

12 – 17 January

Charles Simpson (Cork St.)

Tel: 0131 225 2383

Paintings

5 – 27 February

9 January – 27 March

St Andrews KY16 9DP

Until 27 February

Business Design Centre

22 – 27 March

fruitmarket.co.uk

3 – 27 February

MFA Interim

Trailblazers: Women Artists

Tel: 0133 465 9380

Parkinson Building

52 Upper Street

fcac.co.uk

William McTaggart

14 – 22 May

in the Collection of Perth

Woodhouse Lane

London N1 0QH

9 April – 1 May

National Gallery Complex

3 – 27 February

Degree Show

Museum & Art Gallery

University of Leeds

Tel: 0844 848 0136

Glasgow Boys

Paul Sandby

Steven Appleby: Illustration

12 – 20 June

22 May – January 2011

Leeds LS2 9JT

londonartfair.com

Emily Young: Small Sculptures

67

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Scottish Art News 68

Events 2010

1808 view of the Earl Marshal’s Court in the College of Arms

Lectures & Events at The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DU Introduction to the Scottish Colourists

by Philip Long,Senior Curator, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Wednesday 20 January Doors open 6pm Lecture 6.30–7.30pm Tickets: £7.50; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members £5 Patrons free This Lecture has been kindly sponsored by Flemings Mayfair Hotel

Drawing Class: Still Life with the Scottish Colourists Monday 15 March, 2–5pm Tickets: £20; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members and Patrons £15 All materials, tea & coffee will be provided

An Evening of Scottish Music and Poetry Thursday 22 April Doors open 6pm Performance 7–9pm Price: £35; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members; Patrons £25 69

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Art, Literature and the Highlands

by Murdo Macdonald, Professor of History of Scottish Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Tuesday 27 April Doors open 6pm Lecture 6.30–7.30pm Price: £10; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members £7.50; Patrons free Hebrides & Highlands: An Illustrated Architectural Tour

by Mary Miers, Architectural Writer, Art and Books Editor for Country Life Wednesday 12 May 6–7.30pm Price: £10; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members £7.50; Patrons free External Visits & Events Herald’s Tour of the College of Arms Tuesday 16 February Drinks 6.30pm Tour 7–8pm College of Arms, 130 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BT Tickets: £20; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members, Patrons £15

Introduction to the Artists’ Lives project, National Life Stories at the British Library Sound Archive, London Wednesday 24 February 6–7.45pm Foyle Visitor and Learning Centre, British Library, 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB Tickets: £15, Friends, Philanthropic Friends and Corporate Members £10, Patrons free Tea, coffee &0 biscuits on arrival

Visit to the Westminster Archives Wednesday 24 March, 2–3.30pm 10 St. Ann’s Street London SW1P 2DE Tickets: £15; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members £10; Patrons free Annual Artist led Dinner with James Morrison RSA RSW Monday 26 April, 7pm–10pm Dinner: Flemings Mayfair Hotel Half Moon Street London W1J 7BH Diane Shiach, Director, The Scottish Gallery will lead a discussion with Morrison about his practice Tickets: Free, exclusive to Philanthropic Friends of The Fleming Collection (to join see p. 71) Paintings and Poetry: Day in Glasgow Friday 21 May, 11am–4.45pm Price: £15; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members £10; Patrons £5 (lunch not included) Visit Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900

exhibition at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, followed by a curator-led tour of Aspects of Scottish Art at Hunterian Art Gallery and a rare opportunity to meet and view drawings by Sandy Moffat RSA (Head of Painting, Glasgow School of Art 1992– 2005) and paintings by Eardley, Raeburn and MacTaggart at the Department of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University with a poetry recital by Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature.

Tour of City and Guilds of London Art School during the 2010 Degree Show with visits to Mark Adlington’s Studio and Caroline Wiseman Modern and Originals Saturday 26 June 10.30am–4.45pm Meet: Kennington Tube Station (Northern Line) at 10.30am Tickets: £30; £20 Friends, Corporate Members, Philanthropic Friends, Patrons

Highlands & Islands Children’s Drawing Workshops 5–12yr olds Monday 19 April 10.30am–11.45am 2.00pm–3.15pm The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DU Tickets: £5 per child (10 places for each session only) Save the Date: Behind the Scenes London Weekend 22–25 April 2010 and Friends Dresden Trip, October 2010 To book tickets for any event or for further information or travel advice tel 020 7409 5730 or email: flemingcollection@ffandp.com You can also book online: www.flemingcollection.co.uk

Become a Friend and support the world’s finest collection of Scottish Art in private hands and dedicated art gallery 2010 MARKS THE FLEMING-WYFOLD ART FOUNDATION’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY Friends enjoy:

Choose the membership that suits you:

• Scottish Art News magazine • Friends private views of exhibitions • Annual Friends Lecture • Monthly News Bulletin • A varied programme of exciting events • Discounts on tickets and in-house publications • Annual Behind the Scenes trip • Annual abroad trip

Single £30 Joint £50 Student £20 Single Philanthropic Friend £500 Joint Philanthropic Friends £800 Go one step further in supporting the work of our charitable Foundation and enjoy the Annual Artist led Dinner

To become a Friend, complete the booking form on p. 71 and return it to: Friends of The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Or you can join or buy Gift Membership by telephone Scottish Art News 70

We invite you to join Friends of The Fleming Collection in Dresden on a five day cultural tour in October 2010

2010 MARKS THE FLEMING-WYFOLD ART FOUNDATION’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY PLEASE SUPPORT US DONATIONS

I would like to make a donation to support The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation £50 □ £100 □ £250 □ other ________ JOIN OR UPGRADE YOUR MEMBERSHIP HERE

JOIN NOW Single Joint Student Single Philanthropic Friends Joint Philanthropic Friends Single Patron Joint Patrons

Arranged exclusively for Friends of The Fleming Collection by Heritage Group Travel

After the success of previous visits to the French Riviera and to Madrid, we have once again teamed up with Heritage Group Travel to offer the Friends a special visit to Dresden during the autumn of 2010.

Once known as ‘Florence on the Elbe’, the Saxon capital is home to a number of extraordinarily rich collections of Fine and Decorative Art. The Baroque Zwinger Complex houses the Alte Meister Gallery, one of the world’s great repositories of art, with works by Raphael, Canaletto, Vermeer and Titian among others. It is also home to an excellent porcelain collection.

One of Europe’s most sumptuous treasure chambers meanwhile is the Grünes Gewölbe with its dazzling array of Decorative Arts amassed by the Wettin Electors. It is here that Augustus the Strong realised his vision of a Baroque synthesis of the arts as an expression of wealth and absolutist power. More recent works are also well represented in The New Masters Gallery which reopens in 2010 after extensive renovation. The gallery boasts works from 1800 onwards, its chief attraction being the outstanding inventory of German Romanticist painting as well as numerous works by French and German Impressionists.

Dresden boasts some fine Baroque architecture including the Semper Opera House and the recently restored Frauenkirche, whose dome dominates the city skyline.

Visits beyond the city include a visit to the old town of Meissen, the 18th century birthplace of the European porcelain industry, and the charming hunting lodge of Moritzburg.

Highlights to include: Walking tour of the historic centre . Old Masters Gallery at the Zwinger Palace . Porcelain Collection .

Frauenkirche . Richest collection of decorative arts at the Grünes Gewölbe . Pillnitz Palace Gardens by paddle steamer . Wackerbarth Palace . Visit to medieval town of Meissen on the River Elbe . Porcelain workshops and museum .

Meissen Cathedral . Albrechtsburg Castle . Moritzburg Castle

£30 £50 £20 £500 £800 £1000 £2000

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□ Tick here to receive your monthly bulletin by post instead of email

I AM CURRENTLY Single Joint Student

£30 £50 £20

I WISH TO UPGRADE TO Single Philanthropic £500 Joint Philanthropic £800 Single Patrons £1000 Joint Patrons

£2000

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Total (upgraded price minus current subscription): ________

TICKETS

Event

Date

Friends / Non Friends

Introduction to The Scottish Colourists

20 Jan

£5 / £7.50

College of Arms

16 Feb

£15 / £20

Artists’ Lives, British Library Sound Archive

24 Feb

£10 / £15

Scottish Colourist Drawing Class

5 March

£15 / £20

Westminster Archives

24 March

£10 / £15

Scottish Music and Poetry

22 April

£25 / £35

Annual Artist led Dinner

26 April

Art, Literature and the Highlands

27 April

£7.50 / £10

Hebrides & Highlands

12 May

£7.50 / £10

Hebrides & Highlands

21 May

£15 / £20

City and Guilds

26 June

£20 / £30

No. Friends

No. Non-Friends

Price

FREE

(Philanthropic Friends only)

Personal Details

Method of Payment

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□Visa □Mastercard □Switch/Maestro □Cheque

Address:__________________________________________________________

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Please make cheques payable to Fleming Collection Ltd.

Gift Aid It □ I am eligible as a UK taxpayer and consent to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation claiming Gift Aid on all qualifying subscriptions and donations from the date of this declaration until I notify you otherwise. OR □ I am not eligible as a UK taxpayer/do not consent.

Please note that CAF cheques are accepted for donations and Patrons membership only, not for tickets or Friends membership, they must be made payable to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

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For further information please contact The Fleming Collection Tel: 020 7409 5784

71

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Gift Aid notes: 1. You must pay an amount of UK income tax and/or capital gains tax at least equal to the tax that The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation (FWAF) reclaim on your subscription and donations in the tax year (currently 28p for every £1). 2. If in the future your circumstances change and you are no longer a UK taxpayer you should cancel your declaration. 3. Please notify FWAF should you change your name or address.

4. You can cancel the Gift Aid declaration by notifying FWAF. 5. FWAF’s reference number for the HM Revenue and Customs is XR76701.

Scottish Art News 72

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Please complete the form and fax to +44 (0) 20 7409 560, or send to Scottish Art News subscriptions, The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU. Alternatively, order online: www.flemingcollection.co.uk Back issues of Scottish Art News (Issues 3–1) can be ordered priced £1 plus p+p

Scottish Art News

Sir Muirhead Bone Face of Scotland

ISSUE 12 AUTUMN 2009 £3

Martin Boyce The Discovery of Spain The Public Catalogue Foundation Edinburgh Art Festival

Issue 12 | Autumn 2009

Issue 11 | Spring 2009

Issue 10 | Autumn 2008

Issue 9 | Spring 2008

Issue 8 | Autumn 2007

Issue 7 | Spring 2007

Issue 6 | Autumn 2006

Issue 5 | Spring 2006

Issue 4 | Autumn 2005

Issue 3 | Spring 2005

To order back issues call +44 (0) 20 7409 5730 or email admin@scottishartnews.co.uk 73

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Scottish Art News 74

The Fine Art Society

148 New Bond Street . London . W1S 2JT . www.faslondon.com telephone + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 . art@faslondon.com

Lavery and the Glasgow Boys Opens April 2010 at Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh And then travelling to Alva Gallery, Belfast The Fine Art Society, London

Kenneth McConkey’s new biography of John Lavery will be launched at Kelvingrove in April Contact: Edinburgh . Charlotte Riordan . 0131 557 4050 London . Cordelia Lingard . 020 7629 5116

SIR JOHN LAVERY RA RSA 1856 – 1941 The Goose Girls, 1885 * Oil on canvas

* This painting will be included in Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900 at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow from 9 April – 27 September 2010 and The Royal Academy, London from 30 October 2010 – 30 January 2011